Hi, Before some major changes in our infrastructure, I was interested in the performance impact of moving indexes to our NAS (Emc Celerra v5.5). So I downloaded both dovecot-1.1.19 and dovecot-1.2.6, compiled them and wrote 2 confs for each of them, one with local indexes and another with indexes in the NAS. Then I created 19 pam users, and tested system performance this way: - uninstall current installed version - install a new version - start dovecot - for each user run: imaptest user=user pass=pass host=localhost port=143 mbox=${MBOX} seed=123 secs=300 | tail -1 > file - stop dovecot I'm not sure if these tests are real, but our results are: * In our conf, 1.1.19 and 1.2.6 performance are roughly the same * Moving the indexes to our NAS makes the system 3 times slower As we currently only have 1 system accessing mails or indexes, I tried later with nfs_* = no, and mmap_disable = no. This makes performance 10% better in any situation. Our testing setup (very close to the real one) - Dell PowerEdge 2850, 2 P4 Xeon 3GHz, 3GB RAM - RHEL 4.7 (not sure about this, the last RHEL4) 32 bits - mailboxes are always in a nfs filesystem - for testing mbox file I've used dovecot-cvs.mbox I've attached a couple of graphs to show this results (I've a lot of them, but result are pretty close from one to another). Also, dovecot -n output for 1.2.6 with indexes in the NAS. Only needed changes have been applied from one conf to another. If you feel that the benchmark can be more "real" with some changes, just tell me. Also, if you are interested in the rest of graphs or date, tell me. Next week I'll be quite busy, but as soon as possible I'll test with an iSCSI disk for indexes. Aaaaaaaaaaagur. -- Joseba Torre. Vicegerencia de TICs, ?rea de Explotaci?n -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: nfs_test_126.png Type: image/png Size: 7633 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20091030/8160aa84/attachment-0004.png> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: local vs nas indexes-fetch.png Type: image/png Size: 6684 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20091030/8160aa84/attachment-0005.png> -------------- next part -------------- # 1.2.6: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf # OS: Linux 2.6.9-89.0.11.ELsmp i686 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 8) syslog_facility: local1 protocols: imap imaps pop3 pop3s listen(default): *:143 listen(imap): *:143 listen(pop3): *:110 ssl_listen(default): *:993 ssl_listen(imap): *:993 ssl_listen(pop3): *:995 ssl_cert_file: /usr/share/ssl/certs/lgux51.pem ssl_key_file: /usr/share/ssl/certs/lgux51.pem disable_plaintext_auth: no login_dir: /usr/local/var/run/dovecot/login login_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login login_process_per_connection: no login_max_processes_count: 256 max_mail_processes: 1024 mail_max_userip_connections: 1000 first_valid_uid: 100 mail_location: maildir:~/Maildir:INDEX=/var/dovecot-nas/%u/indices:CONTROL=/var/dovecot-nas/%u/control lock_method: dotlock mail_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3 mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/pop3 pop3_uidl_format(default): %08Xu%08Xv pop3_uidl_format(imap): %08Xu%08Xv pop3_uidl_format(pop3): %v.%u lda: postmaster_address: joseba.torre at ehu.es mail_plugins: quota cmusieve mail_plugins_dir: /usr/local/lib/dovecot/lda log_path: info_log_path: syslog_facility: local2 auth default: cache_size: 1000 cache_ttl: 6000 master_user_separator: * debug: yes passdb: driver: ldap args: /usr/local/etc/dovecot-ldap.conf passdb: driver: pam passdb: driver: passwd-file args: /usr/local/etc/dovecot-master.conf master: yes userdb: driver: prefetch userdb: driver: passwd socket: type: listen master: path: /var/run/dovecot/auth-master mode: 384 plugin: quota: fs