On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 20:33, Javier Castillo Alcibar wrote:
> > I have a debian 2.1 email server, with sendmail as smtp server, and
> > qpopper as POP3 server. This box hosts several domains (about 100 different
> > domains, using virtual hosting), with a total of 1300 users. Because the
> > auth method is based on /etc/passwd, I have 1300 unix user accounts, one
> > per mailbox, of course.
> >
> > This is becomming not scalable, and I want to start to use a mail
> > server with auth based on sql, using MySQL for example. I am thinking in
> > use a debian woody( I'll wait till woody becomes stable), with sendmail as
> > smtp server, but I am not sure about the pop3 daemon I have to use.
>
> /etc/passwd should scale to 1300 users, using nscd should solve any problems
> there. But chances are that changing how you look up user names won't make
> any noticable difference in performance.
I don't think performance is the main issue. It is the username clashes;
for example: info@domain1, info@domain2, ... info@domain100. Using
virtusertable or other mapping begins to become messy and confusing.
In addition, email only accounts don't really need any Unix UID (or
wasted home directories).
> I am guessing that you use /var/spool/mail as I can't imagine any other way
> of getting performance problems with only 1300 users.
qpopper configured to copy mailboxes can be a performance problem when the
mailboxes are huge and clients connect often.
Javier,
Exim can do the MySQL for authentication; do some searches on the
exim-users mailing list archive to find some examples and ideas for POP3
servers that work with it. (It may also be in the Exim FAQ.)
Personally, I don't think the extra baggage of any SQL server is needed or
wise for just email user authentication. (I simply use vm-pop3d which
someday may support db(3) database files.)
Jeremy C. Reed
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