Re: AW: Any numbers of how much traffic postfix can handle?

[ On Monday, June 14, 2004 at 14:30:16 (-0600), J. Ryan Earl wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: AW: Any numbers of how much traffic postfix can handle?
>
> IMAP has
> more overhead than POP3.

That's not necessarily true -- it depends entirely on actual usage
patterns as well as the implementations.

POP3 can be an enormous over-load on a system if the users keep lots of
mail on the server and/or if they check for mail "too often". Even with
10,000 users if they're all online all the time (e.g. a typical
"broadband" ISP situation), and if they all check for mail more often
than every 5 minutes, then you've got a disaster on your hands.

IMAP, especially with the new "IDLE" feature, can drastically reduce the
overhead of the constant-POP-ers, and good, scalable, IMAP
implementations such as the Cyrus one, can efficiently handle many
simultaneous users with the minimum possible overhead. Unfortunately
some IMAP clients seem to open multiple connections, and no matter what
the server implementation it's hard to throttle them effectively.

(of course if you use a brain-damaged implementation of either IMAP or
POP then everything changes :-)


--
Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com> Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>