# courier-imap and gamin - FAMPending: timeout

## geakazoid

Hello all.

I have an odd problem I'm wondering if someone can help me with. I've searched high and low for some sort of solution, but haven't really found much.

I have an email server running courier-imap for all mail checking. The server is under pretty high load throughout he day, mostly due to the amount of users checking huge imap folders. This has caused several issues in terms of client timeouts, etc. As far as I can tell all of the load is directly related to file system access. There's just too many files for the system to deal with.

Anyways, in order to help alleviate some of the load we attempted to install courier-imap with the fam use flag, which caused the installation of gamin. We left it overnight and all seemed well, but as soon as really high connection counts occurred, we began to see this in the logs.

Feb  6 07:41:01 mail-server imapd: FAMPending: timeout

Users reported mail clients locking, and not doing anything, and several tests revealed noone could check mail. It was just like courier stopped. It wasn't rejecting connections, but it wasn't doing anything with them either. We were forced to remove the IMAP_ENHANCEDIDLE=1 in /etc/courier-imap/imapd in order to make it stop using gamin. This put us back to where we've been at, with ever increasing load. I'm fairly positive gamin will help since newer mail clients will behave and wait for the server to inform them of new messages rather than having courier poll the filesystem every 10 minutes.

Can anyone offer any help or advice?

Thanks,

geakazoid

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## scrow

i also am having the same problem trying to get ENHANCEDIDLE support working. here are my versions:

```

net-mail/courier-imap-4.0.4  USE="berkdb fam gdbm nls -debug -ipv6 (-selinux)"

app-admin/gamin-0.1.8  USE="-debug -doc"

sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.19-r5  USE="-build -symlink"

```

my filesystem is XFS.

courier-imap with FAM seemed to work fine for a few hours and then /var/log/mail.log starts to get:

```

Feb  6 07:42:52 laserbeak imapd: FAMPending: timeout

Feb  6 07:42:56 laserbeak imapd-ssl: FAMPending: timeout

```

any ideas how to debug why FAM/gamin disappears?

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## Merlin-TC

I have the same problem. My file system is reiserfs so I don't think it's file system related.

I think gamin isn't even spawned when it's needed.

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