Re: Dovecot 2.4 doveadm_worker_count corrupts tab-formatted output

On 26/02/2026 21:20, Philip Iezzi via dovecot wrote:
> ...
> Hi John
>
> Thanks for looking into this. Yes, those were the last lines of `doveadm -Dv quota get -A` debug output, all related to the same user - I have simply redacted the user with [email protected], but did not change anything else / did not remove any lines. And yes, the problem always occurs on another user and is definitely not related to a specific user.
> I don't really understand the logic here - so maybe it's just some kind of chained request that triggers the next one (2802712577) via `userdb list`.
>
> I also don't quite remember why I added `quota_storage_size` to the iterate_query. Somehow I struggled to get quotas working during Dovecot 2.3 => 2.4 config migration. I have removed it now and all still seems to be working with:
>
> iterate_query = SELECT username AS user FROM mailaccounts WHERE active = 1
>
> Thanks for this input. But this doesn't make a difference. I always get the same Error:
>
> $ doveadm -f json quota get -A >/dev/null; echo $?
> doveadm([email protected]): Error: auth-master: userdb list: User listing returned failure
> doveadm: Error: cmd quota get: Failed to iterate through some users
> 75
>
> correlating with exactly 1 such line in mail.log:
>
> dovecot: auth: Error: auth-worker: Aborted LIST request for *: Shutting down
>
> Here's the thing: This only happens on my mail server with 2200 users, not on the other with "only" 1200 users, both running the exact same config/versions.
> I have now invented this nice funky workaround to completely do without depending on the iterate_query. I don't even need to grab a subset of the users / do any sharding, just pipe all users into `-F`:
>
> $ mysql --quick -srN maildb -e 'SELECT username FROM mailaccounts WHERE active=1' | doveadm -f json quota get -F -
>
> It always works, always gives me the full data (checked with `wc -c`, while `-A` always broke in the middle and never returned the quotas for all users), and it never provokes a crashed auth-worker, above Error no longer showing up.
>
> But I'd like to emphasize, that on Dovecot 2.3, I was running `doveadm quota get -A` for years, without ever running into this issue. It ran as a cache warmup job from my application and pulled all quota usages from Dovecot server, every 4 minutes! I know this is probably not recommended and I could easily reduce it to run only every 15mins or even less frequently. But no matter how often I run it on that server with 2200 users, it always runs fast enough, but always breaks since upgrading to Dovecot 2.4
>
> Cheers,
> Philip

Hi Philip, it really does look like you're hitting some kind of limit. Potentially it could be a mysql timeout but seems unlikely you would have changed mysql_read_timeout from its default 30s.
I wonder if it's an issue only for quota or whether it happens on other iteration queries, for example doveadm user '*'.
John

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