Occasional lock timeouts on Linode VM with Dovecot Replication

[William L. Thomson Jr.]

Reuben,

On Sunday, July 17, 2016 04:18:45 PM Reuben Farrelly wrote:
> I've been seeing periodic entries in my dovecot logs like this:
> 
> dovecot[3464]: dsync-server(kaylene): Error: Couldn't lock
> /home/kaylene/.dovecot-sync.lock: Timed out after 30 seconds: 3 Time(s)
> dovecot[3464]: dsync-server(reuben): Error: Couldn't lock
> /home/reuben/.dovecot-sync.lock: Timed out after 30 seconds: 1 Time(s)
> 
> They occur several times per day, but don't appear to have any obvious
> cause and I am not aware of any problems this is causing.  [They could
> be the cause of some reappearing UID type messages that also
> periodically are logged, but I can't be sure]
> 
> They occur on a lightly loaded Linode VM, KVM Paravirtualised and with
> only local SSD disk storage.  The VM is a Gentoo Linux VM running the
> latest kernels that Linode provide.  I also saw this problem under Xen.

I am running the same, Gentoo, replicating Dovecot, on Linode VMs.  Only 
difference is I am using NFS, it seems you are using local disk. I have never 
had issues like your experiencing. My mail VMs get pretty loaded at times due 
ASSP and mail volume. I would not think it to be load related what so ever.

If you feel it might be specific to that VM you might request Linode move it to 
a new host machine. I have had one of my mail servers have some issues before 
and it was host related. Linode opened a ticket and migrated it about the time 
I got the first Nagios notification. If you get Linode to migrate the VM and it 
continues, you can rule out the host at least.

> Is this a common warning to see in cloud hosted/shared environments?

Not to my knowledge, I have never seen that error before.

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.
Obsidian-Studios, Inc.
http://www.obsidian-studios.com
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