IMAP goes down 2-3 times a week, tomcat restart necessary

[dkarp]

Originally Posted by shanson

The IMAP port was just down again. IMAPS and HTTP were still up. zmcontrol status showed all services running.

I wonder if you're not running out of IMAP threads. Does increasing zimbraImapNumThreads solve the problem?

[shanson]

I missed the suggestion from from dkarp back in June. That's too bad, since the problem persisted even after updating to 4.x, and I resubmitted the problem to Zimbra Support. The second thing they suggested was checking zimbraImapNumThreads.

We have about 120 users, almost all of whom use IMAP. The default value of 200 IMAP threads is therefore most likely too small. We've increased to 400, we'll see if the problem reoccurs.

[shanson]

Another late follow-up: we've since increased zimbraImapNumThreads to 1000, and things are working smoothly. We've also reactivated imapproxy, as suggested by Zimbra support. Our full backups seemed to be hanging on accounts with active IMAPS connections, and activating imapproxy was the solution.

[GetMeOutOfExchange]

Hello,

I am hoping this thread is relevant.

Running Open Edition zcs-5.0.6_GA_2313.DEBIAN4.0.20080522112011.tgz
About 10 users using Thunderbird Clients (set to use a max of 5 connections)
Zimbra IMAP is set to 200 connections at the moment

I originally installed without the IMAP proxy.
After reading this thread I installed and activated the IMAP proxy.

Shortly after this we reinstalled a desktop PC for a user.
The first time Thunderbird connected to the user mail box to fetch and sync the mail, the Zimbra IMAP process stopped accepting connections on 143 or 993 from any of the hosts on the network, although I could telnet localhost 143 from the debian console and get a connection.
After some time we restarted Zimbra and the problem went away.
We have experienced no further problems since then, but we are nervous that we will hit the same problem again.

Please advise.

[GetMeOutOfExchange]

Hello,

can anybody help with the my post ?
My client is ready to throw Zimbra out and go back to MS SBS.

[dkarp]

Does increasing zimbraImapNumThreads solve the problem?

[GetMeOutOfExchange]

Originally Posted by dkarp

Does increasing zimbraImapNumThreads solve the problem?

Hi there, many thanks for response.

Zimbra IMAP is set to 200 connections at the moment (the default from the GUI).
Is that the same as zimbraImapNumThreads ? (I can't see a way to use zmprov to display zimbraImapNumThreads)
Surely 200 is enough for 10 users - but I'd happily bump it up if necessary.
We are running IMAP proxy.

We've had to restart the server twice today....

I have been noticing errors in the logs about too many files being open.
I had a look at this: [SOLVED] Mail deferred due to too many files open

This sounded like the solution, but ulimit -n (as Zimbra) shows 524288

Here's some log entries:

ExceptionId:ImapServer-68:1217326583426:651222ac4f85af1f
Code:service.FAILURE
at com.zimbra.common.service.ServiceException.FAILURE (ServiceException.java:253)
at com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.MessageCache.getMimeMessage( MessageCache.java:271)
at com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.Message.getMimeMessage(Messa ge.java:284)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapMessage.getMimeMessage(Imap Message.java:176)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.fetch(ImapHandler.j ava:2970)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.doFETCH(ImapHandler .java:2826)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.executeRequest(Imap Handler.java:421)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.TcpImapHandler.processCommand(T cpImapHandler.java:125)
at com.zimbra.cs.tcpserver.ProtocolHandler.processCon nection(ProtocolHandler.java:160)
at com.zimbra.cs.tcpserver.ProtocolHandler.run(Protoc olHandler.java:128)
at EDU.oswego.cs.dl.util.concurrent.PooledExecutor$Wo rker.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)
Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /opt/zimbra/store/0/8/msg/0/2631-3961.msg (Too many open files)
at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)
at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(FileInputStream.jav a:106)
at com.zimbra.cs.store.FileBlobStore.getContent(FileB lobStore.java:369)
at com.zimbra.cs.store.FileBlobStore.getContent(FileB lobStore.java:363)
at com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.MessageCache.fetchFromStore( MessageCache.java:289)
at com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.MessageCache.getMimeMessage( MessageCache.java:233)
... 10 more
2008-07-29 11:16:23,428 WARN [ImapServer-68] [name=jackie@mydomain.com;mid=8;ip=192.168.1.253;oi p=192.168.1.100;] imap - ignoring error during UID FE
com.zimbra.common.service.ServiceException: system failure: IOException while retrieving content for item 2634
ExceptionId:ImapServer-68:1217326583428:651222ac4f85af1f
Code:service.FAILURE
at com.zimbra.common.service.ServiceException.FAILURE (ServiceException.java:253)
at com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.MessageCache.getMimeMessage( MessageCache.java:271)
at com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.Message.getMimeMessage(Messa ge.java:284)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapMessage.getMimeMessage(Imap Message.java:176)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.fetch(ImapHandler.j ava:2970)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.doFETCH(ImapHandler .java:2826)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.executeRequest(Imap Handler.java:421)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.TcpImapHandler.processCommand(T cpImapHandler.java:125)
at com.zimbra.cs.tcpserver.ProtocolHandler.processCon nection(ProtocolHandler.java:160)
at com.zimbra.cs.tcpserver.ProtocolHandler.run(Protoc olHandler.java:128)
at EDU.oswego.cs.dl.util.concurrent.PooledExecutor$Wo rker.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)
Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /opt/zimbra/store/0/8/msg/0/2634-3972.msg (Too many open files)
at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)
at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(FileInputStream.jav a:106)
at com.zimbra.cs.store.FileBlobStore.getContent(FileB lobStore.java:369)
at com.zimbra.cs.store.FileBlobStore.getContent(FileB lobStore.java:363)
at com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.MessageCache.fetchFromStore( MessageCache.java:289)
at com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.MessageCache.getMimeMessage( MessageCache.java:233)
... 10 more

[GetMeOutOfExchange]

It was a sad day after all the work we put in.
Somebody tell me this problem has been fixed since zcs-5.0.6_GA_2313.DEBIAN4.0.20080522112011.tgz

I can see we're not the only ones:
Zimbra anyone? - Mac OS X - tribe.net

[uxbod]

It would help if you gave more information about your issues, and especially quoting posts that are over a year old. Oh, ZCS is now on 5.0.16 aswell so you are a bit behind on releases.

[GetMeOutOfExchange]

Hello there,

Thanks for your reply. If you had read the rest of thread you'd see that all of the information has already been detailed and that I have been waiting for a response from the Zimbra crew.

I'd also like you to know that I REALLY wanted to get away from Exchange.
The clue is in my user name !

Yes, that WAS an older version of ZCS. On that site, ZCS was replaced with SBS2003 several months ago.
I'd be delighted if the IMAP issue has been resolved in later versions because it might make me more interested in re-visiting Zimbra.

The question remains: Has the IMAP issue been fixed where:

We have ZCS installed on Debian/Ubuntu with 4Gb RAM.
File handles for the OS has been bumped up to the recommended maximum as per ZCS instructions.
We are using IMAP proxy - as per instructions for this problem.

We have a years worth of IMAP mail in a mailbox.
We reinstall a user PC and reinstall Thunderbird.
We connect Thunderbird to the IMAP account.
Thunderbird starts syncing message headers.
Zimbra dies. (Messages in syslog about file handles)
OS has to be rebooted.

We're considering the idea of using the ZCS connector for Outlook but I'm concerned that the SOAP connector would ask for the entire mailbox and Java would open every single message file to get the header, run out of file handles and then die - which is what appears to be happening under IMAP.
Why aren't you using something like Dovecot for the message store ?