[Dovecot] the most serius problems [part 1]

[Mark E. Mallett]

On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 01:46:33PM +0200, Farkas Levente wrote:
> the first on is the load.
> has anybody else use dovecot in a real enviromnt with at least hundreds 
> of users and at least 50 concurrent user at the same time?
> it seems to me no one else just me.

That seems like an awfully high percentage of users connecting- if I
assume "hundreds" might mean 300, 1 out of every 6 users is connected
at any given time?

One of the servers running dovecot here has thousands of users.  During
the middle of the day I typically see 17-20 users connected at any
given time.  This has been known to increase to 50+ especially during
prime time (evening).  Over a period of 24 hours dovecot logins occur
at the rate of around 2.5 logins per second.  Now- most of our users
are using POP rather than IMAP, but there is still a reasonable amount
of IMAP activity.  Plus I'm not sure that detail matters: POP logins
use resources too, perhaps repeated POP logins use more than
constantly-connected imap sessions.

The load on the server due to dovecot is negligable.  Most of the load
is due to handling incoming mail.  Obviously you are seeing something
different- perhaps you are using features that we are not.

I rather wish dovecot would log some more statistics, as I think has
been mentioned already- like a record for logout as well as one for
login, including number of messages scanned, left on server,
downloaded, and deleted, plus total bytes transferred).  These numbers
would give a better picture of what's going on.

-mm-