Atmail increasingly uses disk space due to tmp files

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on November 30th 2012 - Listed in Linux Mail

In the past days I've been wondering about the following graph, which shows the root partition (/) of an Atmail server:

As you can see, the disk usage continuously grew over time but I didn't know why. I especially separated user mails, logs and MySQL databases to their own mountpoint and their own LV - but something was still eating up the root partition.

After a few du's, I finally got the reponsible directory: /usr/local/atmail/webmail/tmp. This seems to be the Atmail-internal tmp folder for the uploaded mail attachments in Atmail webmail. There were many old files, which obviously were never deleted. But why the heck would these files stay in a tmp folder?

While looking for an answer, I came across this Atmail Wiki post called "Performance Improvements":

Unfortunately I do not know, how old this Wiki post is because on my current Atmail installation (6.6.0) the code looks completely different in application/modules/mail/controllers/AuthController.php:

//remove users tmp folder
//but only if not using memcache
$global = Zend_Registry::get('config')->global;
$useMemcache = (array_key_exists('cacheType', $global) && $global['cacheType'] == 'memcache');
if(!$useMemcache)
{
     $usersTmpFolder = users::getTmpFolder();
     self::removeFolderRecursive($usersTmpFolder);
}

The problem is, that the tmp files are not deleted if Memcache is activated in the Atmail settings. For whatever reason this might be...

Solution: Create a daily cronjob to delete old tmp files, e.g.:

find /usr/local/atmail/webmail/tmp -type f -mtime +7 -exec rm {} +

Update December 4th 2012:
Atmail acknowledged this bug and told me that a fix will become available in a later release of Atmail.

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