[Dovecot] dovecot evaluation on a 30 gb mailbox

Rajesh M 24x7server at 24x7server.net
Fri Jun 25 02:55:12 EEST 2010


> Rajesh M wrote:
>>> Rajesh M wrote:
>>>> eric
>>>>
>>>> i studied LDA a bit
>>>  >
>>>> if i use lda that means all my 5000+ users' email index files will be
>>>> continuously updated when every email arrives -- means a lot of writes
>>>> to
>>>> disk ... is that correct ?
>>> Yes, but I think you make it sound worse than it is. Updating the index
>>> as each email arrives doesn't involve rebuilding the whole index like
>>> what happens at login. It only updates what's there instead of
>>> rebuilding the whole thing. I can't speak from experience, but I expect
>>> that it's very efficient, and you'll never notice any increased load on
>>> the machine. Perhaps the equivalent of adding journaling to a
>>> filesystem. You can ask the dovecot list to verify this.
>>>
>>> Also, it just occurred to me that if you're using ext3, you should be
>>> sure to optimize the filesystem. Off hand, I'd use the noatime and
>>> nodiratime mount options (man mount) and dir_index filesystem option
>>> (man tune2fs).
>>>
>>>> if yes then i dont want that since only around 200 or so people out of
>>>> the
>>>> above 5000 use webmail.
>>> Just to be clear, it affects all imap usage, not only webmail (although
>>> your uses may not use imap other than webmail).
>>>
>>>> i will study a some more and revert
>>> I hope you can figure a way to try this out. I expect that QMT's move
>>> to
>>> dovecot in the future will include the deliver LDA, and your work here
>>> will be a big help getting us there.
>>>
>>> Let me know if I can be of any further help.
>>>
>>> --
>>> -Eric 'shubes'
>>>
>>
>>
>> hi eric
>>
>> few questions
>>
>> i wil enable lda exclusively for this one 30 gb email box using .qmail
>> file see the performance improvement .. is that ok ?
>
> I believe that would be fine.
>
>> can i safely enable atime for this user maildir  ?
>
> Sure. That's simply a performance consideration. I don't believe that
> atime is used for much of anything, so either atime or noatime is safe.
> noatime is just a little faster because the inode (where that piece of
> information is stored) doesn't need to be updated each time a file is
> accessed.
>
>> thanks for your help
>
> Sure. I'm eager to see your results.
>
> --
> -Eric 'shubes'
>


hi eric

this is what i plan to do

as per
http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Qmail

i need to enter the following line in a .qmail file under the Maildir
directory of the user
|/var/qmail/bin/preline -f /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver -d $EXT@$USER

i would add an email forward using qmailadmin web interface (which creates
the .qmail file) and then manually edit the .qmail file and put the above
line in it (so that ownership and permissions are taken care off)

now i would also need to edit the dovecot.conf file
could you guide me on what changes do i need to dovecot.conf file ?


rajesh






More information about the dovecot mailing list