[Dovecot] any limitations running on a Mac?

[Terry Barnum]

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?

> My Inbox is 3.5G on disk and I'm happy with my performance.
> Mail.app took 8 sec. to search my Inbox for "postfix" but caches mail.
> Telnet imap login took 55 sec. for 'search text "postfix"'.
> New mail notifications in Mail.app are near instant. I know your old box fails here.
> 
> 
> // Brad
> 

Terry Barnum
digital OutPost
San Diego, CA

http://www.dop.com
800/464-6434