Hi, I'm planning on a new mail infrastructure which constists of multiple 'frontends' running webmail & public access pop/imap, which would communicate over imap/pop to 'backend mail stores'. My original idea was to run dovecot on the backends, use a predition on the frontends to proxy imap/pop and also run imapproxy in front of webmail [squirrelmail]. I've since read about the dovecot proxying features and it seems to make sense to replace predition in that above scenario. I'm unclear about the benefits of the auth_cache and how it compares to the using imapproxy in front of webmail client? Does it make sense to have authcaching switched on in the proxy and not on the backend server? (Doesn't the authentication just have to happen on the backend server?) Are there any performance benefits to using a proxying server, or is it just for splitting mailstores? thanks for your work, Dan Poltawski -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 835 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20090926/010710aa/attachment-0002.bin>
You didn't get much answer to this - I'm probably not the best person to answer, but> Are there any performance benefits to using a proxying server, or is it just > for splitting mailstores? >I think this is the main reason for the proxying option. It would appear that others have measured the performance load of the proxy task and found it near negligible? Hence it seems possible to use a bunch of backend servers and a few frontend servers to forward the user to the correct backend server. I believe each connection needs to be setup each time though, so for sure some more advanced proxies with persistent caching of connections may offer a performance improvement if your servers are loaded due to the login part (but I guess measure this first before assuming it's so?) Some have even used the backend servers as the frontend proxy servers, ie if you only have a small number of servers then make them all frontend and backend servers, eg with three servers you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting straight onto the correct server, otherwise proxy over to the correct server... Good luck Ed W