[Dovecot] How to get rid of locks

[Miquel van Smoorenburg]

On Sat, 2007-04-07 at 22:30 +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> Although Dovecot is already read-lockless and it uses only short- 
> lived write locks, it's be really nice to just get rid of the locking  
> completely. :)
> 
> I just figured out that O_APPEND is pretty great. If the operating  
> system updates seek position after writing to a file opened with  
> O_APPEND, writes to Dovecot's transaction log file can be made  
> lockless.

Doest his mean there's even less chance of indexes working on NFS (where
O_APPEND doesn't really work) ?

That's a pity, as a lot of larger sites use NFS. They are already forced
to use indexes on local disk - and dovecot seems to rely on indexes more
and more (fulltext index, shared mailboxes, etc).

And mailbox formats like dbox don't even work without an index.

I had hoped that the existing index code would be made more reliable and
network-filesystem safe first.

Mike.