[Dovecot] Dovecot strong or not for a big Webmail architecture

Geert Hendrickx ghen at telenet.be
Sat Aug 4 01:46:30 EEST 2007


On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 12:03:30PM -0400, Bill Boebel wrote:
> > Do you think it's a good solution to use one synchronised local Openldap on each
> > server Dovecot ?
> 
> No.  I'd replicate your ldap database on a few servers that are dedicated
> to that purpose, and on each mail server use Dovecot's auth_cach feature
> to minimize how often it needs to query ldap.

A few OpenLDAP servers should be able to cope with the load easily.  We're
using 3 OpenLDAP servers for >1.000.000 mailboxes and they're mostly idle.
Just make sure you setup the right indexes.

> > Do you think It's possible to use Postgresql or MySQL instead of
> > Openldap ?
> 
> We use MySQL.  MySQL handles frequent writes better than OpenLDAP from
> our experience.  It is also simpler for us to do replication and
> troubleshooting because we employ several MysQL gurus already.

Provisioning data usually is not written frequently, but read continously.
This is where LDAP works better.  And read-only replication is easy enough
with OpenLDAP.


	Geert


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