On Fri, 2004-07-02 at 21:34, Paul Reilly wrote:
How does the flat file for authentication scale to large numbers of accounts? Eg:
auth_passdb = passwd-file /path/to/file
Courier makes a db version of the userdb file for fast access. Is this needed/planned for Dovecot? How does it scale for tens of thousands of users?
dovecot-auth reads the file into hash table at startup and every time it's modified. I _think_ it would work well with lots of users, assuming you have enough memory and the file doesn't change constantly.
Storing it into disk would be .. well, I'm not sure if it would be faster or slower. It would depend on all kinds of things, such as how much it needs memory, how small part of the users actually login, how often passwords are changed etc.
Does Courier user Berkeley DB for the .db file? That might work better in general, but I don't really have plans to support it at least yet. You might as well just use SQL database.