Hi, In our mail signing service implementation, we use multiple Djigzo worker nodes connecting to an Oracle database on a remote server. We manage the database from a separate host that's not used to sign e-mails, only to manage the database. It's also the only host that has digzo-web installed. We don't use the webmail interface, the workers are not internet-facing, we don't use djigzo to encrypt e-mails (the management host is not internet-facing, either, it's only accessed internally).
The system works fine, allows really large volume of outgoing mail to be signed, but we identified two bottlenecks in the implementation and we're wondering if it's possible to eliminate them. 1. The service connects to the remote database to collect the certificate for every single signature made. This requires a significant number of logins to the database and our database admins asked us to check if we can limit this. 2. Mail signing workers connect to the database for every signature. We tried enabling cache in our testing environment (using EhCache), but djigzo.service fails to start, apparently there's no library. I didn't try adding it manually, I assume there is a reason for not shipping cache libraries with the product. Could you shed more light on it? We're not using the service to encrypt mail, we're only using it to sign. 3. Chipermail raises CRL lookup threads to our certificate providers. Internet connections are firewalled, so they time out. We don't even need the lookup functionality on workers and if we were to use it, we would run it on the management host. Can those threads be disabled? 4. Workers failed when we tried to access the database with a read-only user. Apparently Djigzo tries to write to the database and won't work if the user has no write access. Is there a way to disable writes to the database and use the database with a read only user? To recap: 1: Can we limit the number of simultaneous logins and/or active connections to the database? 2: Can we enable caching? We don't write to the database, so if we enabled it, caching the signing keys locally would eliminate the remote database connection bottleneck. 3: Can we disable CRL lookups and all other internet connections from djigzo? Disabling them would eliminate a few threads that open a connection to the database which would also reduce the load on the db server. 4: Can we use the database from djigzo workers in read only mode? We would like to completely disable writes to the database to prevent any potential database corruption and to improve performance by eliminating any locking mechanism in the database. Best regards, Marek
