[Dovecot] Blocking auth services

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mon, 2011-08-08 at 14:04 +0200, Peter Mogensen wrote:

> I'm writing an passdb/userdb plugin to authenticate against an external 
> daemon listening on a UNIX socket.
> 
> The connection to the daemon is 1 request at a time and thus blocking 
> (unlike passdb-ldap), but the daemon is preforking, so it can handle 
> more connections at a time.

You're talking to it via UNIX socket, so you can talk to it with
non-blocking sockets.

> But I also have the option, to let the passdb/userdb plugin maintain a 
> pools of used/idle connections to the daemon and just pick a idle 
> connection and moving it to the used pool on each auth_request.
> Which would save me the auth worker processes.

This would be more efficient. (I wonder if you could make your external
daemon talk auth-worker protocol and Dovecot would do this pooling
automatically by thinking it's talking to its own workers?)