dovecot - Jan 2010 - architecture to handle 1000 messages per second?

Can anyone describe an architecture which can handle 1000 IMAP or POP
messages per second?  Ideally, it would be hosted in the cloud and
additional instances could be launched to handle additional load.

Bob

On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Bob Eastbrook <baconeater789 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Can anyone describe an architecture which can handle 1000 IMAP or POP
> messages per second? ?Ideally, it would be hosted in the cloud and
> additional instances could be launched to handle additional load.
More information: imagine an app which processes orders for concert
tickets via email.  The app connects to a server via POP or IMAP,
downloads orders, and then deletes them from the server.  There aren't
thousands of users simultaneously accessing and searching their mail,
but rather only one account (orders at example.com) but thousands of
emails per second.

Ideally, it could be cloud hosted so that instances could be launched
before tickets go on sale.  Instances can be shut down after the rush.

Bob

On 1.1.2010, at 18.15, Bob Eastbrook wrote:
> I think it might be difficult to accomplish this via POP since I think
> Dovecot would have to lock the account while doing the POP downloads.
> This makes it difficult to have more than one app downloading at a
> time.
The locking behavior is optional, and disabled by default (pop3_lock_session).

On Sat, 02 Jan 2010 11:09:33 Bob Eastbrook wrote:
> Can anyone describe an architecture which can handle 1000 IMAP or POP
> messages per second?  Ideally, it would be hosted in the cloud and
> additional instances could be launched to handle additional load.
>
> Bob
The Courier IMAP server is a fast, scalable, enterprise IMAP server that uses 
Maildirs. Many E-mail service providers use the Courier IMAP server to easy 
handle hundreds of thousands of mail accounts. With its built-in IMAP and 
POP3 aggregation proxy, the Courier IMAP server has practically infinite 
horizontal scalability. In a proxy configuration, a pool of Courier servers 
service initial IMAP and POP3 connections from clients. They wait to receive 
the client's log in request, look up the server that actually holds this
mail
account's mailbox, and establish a proxy connection to the server, all in a 
single, seamless process. Mail accounts can be moved between different 
servers, to achieve optimum resource usage.

http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/