[Dovecot] High level of pop3 popping causing server to become unresponsive

[Timo Sirainen]

On 30.5.2012, at 20.25, Root Kev wrote:

> mail_location = mbox:/var/empty:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

Note that it's not a good idea for different users to share a single directory for indexes, which is what this does. Preferably /var/empty wouldn't be even writable to the users so this wouldn't happen accidentally. You could instead use something like:

mail_location = mbox:/var/empty:INBOX=/var/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/index/%u

But if the clients always just download + delete everything, the index files shouldn't make any (positive) difference.

> Had a chance to test this change this morning, and in my test environment,
> this does drastically improve the ability to ssh and su during heavy pop3
> load (in test environment, change of 10-15sec to 1-2sec login).  While this

If you think the problem is authentication, try with passdb + userdb static (http://wiki2.dovecot.org/PasswordDatabase/Static) or passwd-file (http://wiki2.dovecot.org/AuthDatabase/PasswdFile) and see if you can reproduce the slowdowns with them.