hi, I try to collect out most serious problem with dovecot. so I write a series of mails:-) the first on is the load. has anybody else use dovecot in a real enviromnt with at least hundreds of users and at least 50 concurrent user at the same time? it seems to me no one else just me. the weekend I move the whole mail system to a quad P4 with 1Gb ram and this server do nothing just imap. yesterday evening I have to delete all .imap.index and other dovecot specific files. and as I wrote today morning the load was about 20-30 !!!. but even in an average day the load is over 2-3 white the cpu load is 1-2% in each of the 4 processor. the system is totaly unusable. what more today I've got other errors. of course all the time when I can't find the colution I try to escape to the latest cvs. today finally I compile a new courier install it to another port and those clients which can't connect to dovecot reconfigure to courier. but they are not compatible!!! I have to set root directory to INBOX in courier while not for dovecot and this is a real big problem. is there any way to compile dovecot to use INBOX as a root directory? since in this case at least there is a chance to switch to courier without reconfigure 300 OE6. I try to help to find out the reason for the load in any way, but it seems to me than it's better to change to courier or cyrus since our users getting angry not to mention my boss. -- Levente "Si vis pacem para bellum!"
On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 14:46, Farkas Levente wrote:> has anybody else use dovecot in a real enviromnt with at least hundreds > of users and at least 50 concurrent user at the same time?Well, I know 0.99.9 has been in use with some 40 concurrent users (asked two people). Didn't 0.99.9 actually work with you too without high load?> I have to set > root directory to INBOX in courier while not for dovecot and this is a > real big problem. is there any way to compile dovecot to use INBOX as a > root directory? since in this case at least there is a chance to switch > to courier without reconfigure 300 OE6.Haven't you configured them now to non-INBOX? You could kludge Dovecot to use INBOX. prefix, or Courier to not use it, but there's no pretty way to do it really. ..but i'm late now, have to look these again later today.
On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 01:46:33PM +0200, Farkas Levente wrote:> the first on is the load. > has anybody else use dovecot in a real enviromnt with at least hundreds > of users and at least 50 concurrent user at the same time? > it seems to me no one else just me.That seems like an awfully high percentage of users connecting- if I assume "hundreds" might mean 300, 1 out of every 6 users is connected at any given time? One of the servers running dovecot here has thousands of users. During the middle of the day I typically see 17-20 users connected at any given time. This has been known to increase to 50+ especially during prime time (evening). Over a period of 24 hours dovecot logins occur at the rate of around 2.5 logins per second. Now- most of our users are using POP rather than IMAP, but there is still a reasonable amount of IMAP activity. Plus I'm not sure that detail matters: POP logins use resources too, perhaps repeated POP logins use more than constantly-connected imap sessions. The load on the server due to dovecot is negligable. Most of the load is due to handling incoming mail. Obviously you are seeing something different- perhaps you are using features that we are not. I rather wish dovecot would log some more statistics, as I think has been mentioned already- like a record for logout as well as one for login, including number of messages scanned, left on server, downloaded, and deleted, plus total bytes transferred). These numbers would give a better picture of what's going on. -mm-