hi On Sun, 4 Mar 2007, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Of course not. My ISP uses Courier-IMAP to provide IMAP service for tens > of thousands of users. Couldn't get a definitive answer on their customer I can attest to that. Also, courier is much easier to scale since as long as you're using a common user database, you can add as many front-end machines as you need. And you can also add multiple backends (e.g. nfs servers) without much hassle, since user home directory location is also kept in the database and locking (in rare cases where it's needed with Maildir) is supported natively by courier. Compare that with cyrus, which doesn't officially support nfs storage altogether because it's "inefficient" (netapp, anyone?) and locking is "hard". So they handle clustering by forwarding requests to the machine where user account is located or by providing a reference to that machine to avoid forwarding, which is supported only in Mulberry (I bet a lot of you didn't even hear that such mail client exists). BTW, you can do the same forwarding trick with courier, but you don't need to unless you decide to use local storage on every imap front-end box. > As far as tens of thousands of messages per folder, the server itself won't > have any issues, it's the underlying filesystem. If your filesystem falls > apart when there are tens of thousands of messages in a folder, that's that. > There are filesystem that should easily handle hundreds of thousands of > messages. There's also a practical limit for mail clients. They tend to fall apart much earlier than the server filesystem does. You can still work with about 50,000 msgs in a single folder, but the practical limit seems to be around 30,000 or less on a modern client machine. -- rgds, serge ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
