[Dovecot] Thunderbird Problem - What causes this?
Strange problem and I'm not sure what's causing it. I'm using IMAP. A new message arives in the inbox. I see it displayed in the message list in bold. I click on the message and it looks like it's reading it by the previous message that was in the window remains and the new message is still bold (unread). However I can then click on an old message and then click on the new message again and it reads.
I have also seen Thunderbird be in a somewhat unresponsive state. You can click on messages and they don't read. But Shutting down Thunderbird and restarting it make it responsive again.
Has anyone seen this?
On Sun, 2008-01-27 at 20:49 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
When? I can't find a mail from you about it. Although there are some old mails about Dovecot v0.99.x.
This used to happen with some old Dovecot versions (before v1.0 RCs), but I don't remember having heard about it for at least a year now.
Anne Wilson wrote:
OK - I didn't know that I might be reporting something new. Here's some more details. I leave my computer on at might (Windows XP) and it's worse in the morning when I wake up. Thunderbird's checks the email every 1 minute and it's set up to check several IMAP folders. I'm running the latest Thunderbird release as will as the latest Dovecot (not the beta versions).
In the morning it is as if it can't access dovecot at all. I get an hour glass as if it is waiting for something that's never going to respond. But if I shut down Thunderbird and restart it then everything works normal for a while.
My server is doing a lot of work but the load levels are low. Running Fedora 8, dual core AMD 6000+ processor with 8 gigs of ram.
My experimenting with adding more authentication processes seems to help but I could be fooling myself. That's why I'm experimenting to try to figure out what's making it slow.
Like someone else said, I saw something like this happen with several RCs but at the time I thought it was MBOX related. I'm not using Maildir.
Hope this extra info helps.
Marc Perkel wrote:
A summary of below: make sure you are actually still connected to your original session in dovecot before you suspect it:
Try running a script to run 'netstat' frequently, say once a minute, and log the port numbers from the connection, example: TCP reinheitsgebot:3482 mail.egr.msu.edu:993 ESTABLISHED TCP reinheitsgebot:3485 mail.egr.msu.edu:993 ESTABLISHED
You probably want to do this on the server side as well as the client
side, just to check that if a connection is dropped,
it happens on both at the same time (if not, something sounds odd!).
I'm not sure if your problem happens if you only
have thunderbird check the inbox, but I would expect at least one
connection (inbox) to stay connected constantly
without disruption. If the client side port number changes (eg. 3482),
it got disconnected for some reason. For the
most part, Thunderbird tries to make disconnections invisible to the
user, which is nice when it works right, but misleading
when something goes wrong, such as when thunderbird acts obstinant about
loading messages but works when you restart.
The reason I suggest this, and even if it might be a simpler case for
you but similar symptoms/effect, I had a load balancer
situation where connections would get dropped on the client side from a
cause outside of the load balancer or server, and
thunderbird would not always reconnect nicely when that happened.
Literally the fault was not in the load balancer or server,
but another server that stuck its nose in and effectively tried to steal
the connection, making the client run into a brick wall
and disconnect. The same happened to https connections.
You might also try a different client such as mutt, which will make it painfully obvious if you get disconnected overnight, because it won't try to reconnect.
Now on the other hand, if you can verify a single connection does stay open using the same source/dst port pair, you could start zeroing in on what is actually happening inside that connection, if it takes tcpdump on both side plus nonssl imap, etc.
On Sun, 2008-01-27 at 18:04 -0500, Adam McDougall wrote:
Cheers! :-)
-- char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0.@ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4"; main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1: (c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}
on 1/27/2008 2:40 PM Marc Perkel spake the following:
Hammering the server every minute can be hard on the server. Especially if all the users do the same. I personally make users check no more than every 10 minutes automatically.
I use Xp and also leave it on all the time. Sometimes Thunderbird will seem to run out of memor, and a restart is the only thing that will help. But in my case it isn't dovecot because I can still read my mail from other clients and other machines.
Trimming the accesses down from every minute should help this also.
-- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!
participants (8)
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Adam McDougall
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Anne Wilson
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Ed W
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Karsten Bräckelmann
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Marc Perkel
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mouss
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Scott Silva
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Timo Sirainen