On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 01:58, Ray Jackson wrote:
> I have read many differing views on the
> Cyrus vs.
> Courier issue and still haven't made up my mind which way to go. The main
> reasons I like Courier is the shared mail store (i.e. you can have multiple
> servers mount the mail store over NFS and not risk corruptions of mailboxes
> etc.) - as far as I know Courier is the only solution that will allow us to do
> this.
dovecot in Maildir mode should also allow this.
> I know ext2/ext3 has performance issues with Courier,
its more general than that - ext2/3 (without btree directory extensions)
do not behave very well if there are many files in a directory.
> but here
> we have a
> NetApp FAS270 filer which apparently performs considerably better with Courier
> implementations.
This was what was (and I guess still is) used at Planet/Energis
(although that was pop only). NetApps are very good for this
environment, and you can additionally tweak things to make the best use
of NFS (ie don't start doing stats for data you can retrieve from the
dir read) - NFSv3 should also help quite a lot on some of this stuff.
When I last looked at this (in 98 so I am very dated now) Cyrus was not
an option because the licensing costs were so confused, and imap was not
important. However my gut feel is that a *good* NAS file server with
dumb front ends would still work well, but a redirection model (ie each
box holds a smaller set of accounts locally and you get put to the right
box) would be worth a look.
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
