[Dovecot] any limitations running on a Mac?

Bradley Giesbrecht bradley.giesbrecht at gmail.com
Fri Feb 26 03:17:50 EET 2010


On Feb 25, 2010, at 4:31 PM, Terry Barnum wrote:

> On Feb 25, 2010, at 3:29 PM, Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
>
>> On Feb 25, 2010, at 2:17 PM, Terry Barnum wrote:
>>
>>> I have postfix/dovecot/mysql installed using MacPorts on a quad- 
>>> core 2.8GHz MacPro running Snow Leopard (10.6.2). I moved the base  
>>> mail directory to a pair of 10k RPM Raptors that are mirrored (/ 
>>> Volumes/email/) and everything seems to be working fine on an  
>>> unused domain with very little traffic. I used imapsync to pull  
>>> everything from the current mailserver to this test server to play  
>>> with.
>>>
>>> Our current mailserver's IMAP performance *really* suffers when an  
>>> IMAP folder exceeds ~500MB or ~5k messages. I've become very tired  
>>> of being the mailbox police trying to get my 20 users to delete  
>>> email or divide into smaller mailboxes.
>>>
>>> Are there folks on the list running postfix/dovecot on similar Mac  
>>> hardware that can share their experiences? Specifically, are there  
>>> any limitations (file descriptors, other?) that can impact  
>>> performance I should be aware of? How does dovecot on the Mac deal  
>>> with >500GB maildirs?
>>>
>>> Is there a recommended tool for loading and testing the server?  
>>> Postal?
>>>
>>> I have 20 IMAP users, with a total of ~37GB of mail currently.
>>>
>>> Thanks for any help and insight.
>>
>> Mac OS X 10.5.8
>> dovecot 1.2.9
>> Two mirrored 7200rpm sata drives.
>> dbox mailbox format
>
> Thanks Brad. What hardware is this running on? Also, are you using  
> the plain vanilla Apple RAID tool for mirroring or something else  
> like SoftRAID?


DP G5 2Ghz.
5.5GB ram.
Apple Disk Utility software RAID 1.

Users are virtual in mysql.
I also have a fairly busy application hitting mysql. Mysql seems to be  
cacheing around 120 threads which is less the config max and I usually  
have a
around 700MB of free memory.

User Inbox count around 200 on 20 domains but we are a Print company  
and have to except large attachments and store indefinitely.

Did you use macports to build dovecot?

If so I'm working of some new packages you may be interested in.  
Mostly dovecot-sieve and dovecot-managesieve.

Your welcome to hit me up off list if you have some non-dovecot  
questions.
I'm small time compared to many here but I love dovecot and won't be  
looking elsewhere till I come home broke and bleeding.


// Brad



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