we're running courier (POP3 and IMAP) on our largest mail cluster (over
15k users in /etc/passwd); there are about 4 machines which share the
load (pseudo load-balanced using multiple DNS records).

we have problems with the authdaemon sometimes; the authdaemonrc file
says:

# However, the default of 5 SHOULD be sufficient.  Bumping up daemon
# count is only a short-term solution.  The permanent solution is to add
# more resources: RAM, faster disks, faster CPUs...

we currently have the process limit set to 15, but we occasionally still
hear complaints of authentication failures...

we're not using any type of authentication other than PAM at the moment;
would it be better to avoid the authdaemon entirely?  any tips for
optimizing performance?  would upping this limit to 25 be likely to
cause problems?

the machines in question aren't super buff, but they're not too weak
either; i think they're mostly dual pIII 866. the disks are scsi and
don't have too much other disk-intensive stuff going on.

the machine is using most of its memory, but isn't swapping.

as you can see in this top output from one machine, the load can get
fairly high on some of these machines.

 13:40:17 up 4 days, 16:11,  3 users,  load average: 6.38, 6.13, 6.14
151 processes: 148 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  27.4% user,   2.4% system,   0.0% nice,  70.2% idle
Mem:    900048K total,   893464K used,     6584K free,     3672K buffers
Swap:  1020116K total,     8988K used,  1011128K free,   763312K cached

machines are running debian linux (3.0 / woody) with the stock debian
packages for courier-base, courier-authdaemon, courier-pop (+ ssl pop),
courier-imap (+ ssl imap).

jareth% wc -l /etc/passwd
  16501 /etc/passwd

jareth% uname -a
Linux jareth 2.4.17+w+nfspat+ndnfhs3+++1gb-v2.07 #1 SMP Thu Mar 14
10:03:11 PST 2002 i686 unknown

-- 
Will Yardley
input: william < @ hq . newdream . net . >


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