On Thursday 27 Oct 2005 17:42, Marcus Don wrote:
Hi
We've been using Dovecot as our primary IMAP and POP3 server for around 70,000 users for a couple of months now. On the whole, we've been very pleased with the performance of Dovecot - and are extremely grateful to the developers! However, we have had a few issues, some of which we have yet to resolve.
We chose Dovecot because it was the only IMAP/POP3 server we could find that supported direct mysql authentication and both mboxes and maildirs. With exim as our main SMTP server, we were able to convert the inboxes and imap folders for all 70,000 users from mboxes to maildirs without any downtime whatsoever!
For those who are interested, we have a cluster of 5 web/imap servers (running our own webmail software) and a further 5 pop servers all placed behind 2 Zeus load balancers and running RHEL 4 (actually CentOS 4.1). Storage is provided by an EMC Clariion device, which is mounted via NFS onto all servers in the cluster over gigabit ethernet.
- index files
The main problem has always been the index files becoming corrupted. This seems to have improved with the Alpha 4 release, but still happens for several users each day. Perhaps it would be possible for Dovecot to just delete index files and re-create them when they are corrupted, rather than just erroring? Also, how do you turn off index files altogether? Even when mail_never_cache_fields is set for all available fields, they still get created.
[snip]
Thanks
Marcus
Hi Marcus,
Good to see another UK ISP using dovecot :) We use an LVS director with 4 pop/imap servers and a master-slave mysql backend for auth. The only problem we are still seeing that I am aware of is dovecot seems to sometimes rely on stale indexes rather than checking to see if they are correct first. This can cause clients to get message not found errors. I would debug properly but every time I get a moment free Manchester's IFL gets too hot and a server goes pop so I have to fix that instead.
Regards Andrew
Andrew Hutchings (A-Wing) - Linux Guru
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