[Dovecot] unofficial Survey about your Dovecot server :) to compare with my own server setup...

[Flavio Domingos]

Hi Borthers/Sisters

Thanks for all the developer(s) and for all the hard work spent on build 
this great piece of software! I loved Dovecot since it is really easy to 
set up and really fast but I am really new to it (only 2 weeks and 
half). Right now, our server configuration is:

Server: Apple Xserve G5 dual
RAM: 4GB
Number of Users: ~ 150 IMAP only users
Authentication: LDAP
Mailboxes sizes: ~200GB
Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 5  (I am looking forward to beta 7 that was 
released today)
Email client software: mostly Thunderbird 1.5


Right now, we are experiencing occasional problem with imap users unable 
to connect to the server. With beta 3, we had to restart the 
dovecot/imap processes almost every 3 hours. with Dovecot beta5 we still 
have to restart the processes but it seems to occur every 3 days (Friday 
and Yesterday) and only in a peak time (around 3pm). I am waiting to 
occur it again and I will be able to grab more information about the 
number of processes, users, virtual memory, etc, etc. So, at this point, 
I don't have much information to debug the problem. Let's wait.

I guess we have here a nice machine (xserve) and not a huge number of 
users (~150). So, I would expect that our server would handle the load. 
But having to restart Dovecot once a while, as I described, is not an 
option (users are getting frustrated). :(   Maybe with Beta 7 with the 
feature "Added shutdown_clients setting to control if existing imap/pop3 
processes should be killed when master is" can stop our nightmares :)

By the way, our dovecot.conf is basically the default sent with the 
software. We haven't changed much there!

Meanwhile, I'd like to know, if possible, whar are you using to run 
Dovecot like hardware, OS version, number of users and problems that you 
are experiencing. I'd like to compare with my setup and if it is the 
case, migrate to pure Linux or FreeBSD if it is more stable than OS/X!

Best Regards,

Flavio Domingos
- San Francisco/CA -