[Dovecot] dovecot evaluation on a 30 gb mailbox

[Brandon Davidson]

Timo,

On 6/24/10 4:23 AM, "Timo Sirainen" <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
>> 
>> I'd recommend also installing and configuring imapproxy - it can be
>> beneficial with squirrelmail.
> 
> Do you have any about a real world numbers about installation with and without
> imapproxy?

We run imapproxy behind our Roundcube instance, and our old in-house Perl
mail system has a custom equivalent written in C that also does some caching
of folder metadata and message headers.

We run a proxy instance on each of the webmail hosts, with the communication
between the web application add the proxy being done in cleartext, but with
the proxy -> Dovecot communication secured over SSL. Besides preventing a
lot of extra SSL handshakes and login/logout actions, it also helps tie a
user session to a single backend node in our pool of IMAP servers. It seems
like there might also be other benefits to having Dovecot not tear down all
of the user session state between page loads.

A lot of this stuff might be nice to see in the Director some day. If there
was an option to not immediately close the Director proxy's backend
connections when the user logs out, (ie leave the connection active and
logged in for X seconds, and reuse it if the user logs in to the Director
again), and if the auth caching works as well as you say, then I could
definitely see a day where we replace imapproxy with a director instance on
the webmail host.

-Brad