[Dovecot] dovecot performance

Giorgenes Gelatti
Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:38:50 -0000

Hello All,

I've been studying dovecot for replacing my company's current system
and I got a little worried about an aspect of the dovecot's design.
I was surprised that dovecot doesn't use prefork for its mail
processes, forking a new processes for each new client connection.

Talking in the #dovecot channel I was gave a scenario of a system
supporting ~40k users with 4 servers just fine.
I wonder how well dovecot would scale if we increase this number of
users by some order of magnitude like, say, 4M users.

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.

Do you have any plans to support preforking in the near future?

Best regards,
giorgenes