[Dovecot] Newbie questions: Load-balanced Dovecot with NFS storage
bhayden at umn.edu
bhayden at umn.edu
Fri Mar 2 17:10:56 EET 2007
On Mar 2 2007, Mike Brudenell wrote:
>Thankfully this shouldn't be an issue for us. We use the University
>of Cambridge's "Prayer" webmail software. Rather than being
>something you run under a web server such as Apache it's actually a
>custom-written HTTP to IMAP gateway and so gives a number of very
>special benefits:
>
> * Persistent browser-to-gateway sessions (where supported)
> * Persistent gateway-to-imap-server sessions
> * Aggressive caching
> * GZipping of data en route to browser (benefits slow connections)
>
>It is VERY speedy to use: a number of our users have been impressed,
>even when working at the end of a slow dialup link around the world
>from us in Australia.
I'll concur with this note about Prayer. We have a very similar overall
setup, including Prayer as one of our two Webmail offerings--on a normal
day, it bears over half our user load (something like 35K out of 65K users,
with ~8.5K peak concurrent sessions). The interface is heavily modified,
but the guts are still Prayer. In our tests it, frankly, bested any other
similar free product by a good margin (with the exception of the University
of Oregon's AlphaMail).
To get back on topic, we were suffering from the 256-file-descriptor issue
under Solaris 10 (with all IMAP/POP3 connections SSL-only), and I can
confirm that it is fixed in recent RCs. We're currently ramping up the user
count on our initial Dovecot system and so far it is going smoothly.
-Brian Hayden
OIT Internet Services
University of MN
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