[Dovecot] dovecot performance

tomas at tuxteam.de
Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:08:23 -0000

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 03:38:50PM -0300, Giorgenes Gelatti
wrote:
> Hello All,

[...]

> It is well known that preforking is a good pratice if you want to
> achieve a higher performance.
> When I was asked about it I readily answered: "of course it
does". For
> my surprise later, i doesn't.

With fork latencies in the range of 500 to 1500 microseconds (on Pentium
900 MHz-class hardware!) on most modern kernels[1] I wonder whether this
"good practice" isn't on the verge of voodoo ;-)

(Of course, in a http server, where you might expect thousands of
connects per second, this is another story -- which is mitigated by HTTP
1.1, when properly streaming several requests per connection).

- ----------------
[1] <http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/>, search "The fork
benchmark"

Regards
- -- tom?s
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFIpR1XBcgs9XrR2kYRAqPdAJ0dbp+fUW0MpWdNvXa3SUvXP3v3eQCcCsTS
hFbhMpoG+OjI4i+za6xNn+4=SRgx
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----