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