I will be deploying Dovecot on OS X shortly. I am looking for
clarification on the limits imposed by OS X and sysctl
[kern.maxproc]. I understand that it is defaulting to 532, but can be
raised to 2500. I believe the OS uses around 100 or so, plus I will
have other processes and shells at times.
Does Dovecot use one process per user logged in? I find Apple Mail
uses about 4 IMAP connections per account. I am not sure that my
current number of mail users would be able to be supported on OS X
even if I bump up to 2500.
Does Dovecot use one process per user logged in differently based on
IMAP versus POP? Perhaps this is something that can also be changed
in Dovecot, if so, can someone point me to the docs about it, or
explain the downsides of going against default behavior.
If this is the case, what are my options? Does OS X server have a
higher limit in their kernel, or is this across the board? Is it even
possible to compile a kernel for OS X with this change, or does that
generally mess things up pretty bad?
FreeBSD and Solaris seem to have much higher limits, and certainly a
much more approachable way of upping those limits. Does anyone know
why OS X chose to set these so low, especially given that they do sell
server based hardware with a server based OS.
Thanks.
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *