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Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 16:53:16 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: popa3d-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: New User: Supports selective pop3 access? Ldap? support?

On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 08:22:46AM +0530, Abhishek Daga wrote:
> To clarify my question below,
> IMAP-Courier is my REAL pop3 Server and LDAP is where all the account
> information is stored as opposed to mysql. They will not be used as
> proxies, but popa3d(or perdition) will be used as a proxy to "allow" or
> "deny".

popa3d can "allow" or "deny", but it can't be used as a POP3 proxy.
It is a POP3 server, not a POP3 proxy.

If you only want to "allow" or "deny" things, I suggest that you
configure your POP3 server (be it Courier or popa3d) to do that, --
not complicate things by moving some of the authorization checks to a
proxy server.

> It can also be used to balance the load across several machines.

That really does require a POP3 proxy, -- but I doubt that you have
sufficient load to justify it.  How many mailboxes do you have in all
of your domains?  If it's under, say, 20k, then one machine is enough.

Also, from my experience, SMTP deliveries are more likely to become
the performance bottleneck than the POP3 sessions.  Observe:

 1798515  453804.75re     708.31cp         0avio       432k   sendmail*
  911290   18310.03re     283.84cp         0avio       184k   popa3d*
  314347    1529.92re     187.02cp         0avio       201k   procmail.system
  634367     295.63re     122.68cp         0avio       201k   grep
  314340     510.67re      19.12cp         0avio       246k   dynamic-check
     614    1403.75re      16.83cp         0avio       426k   sendmail
  436772     413.26re      15.56cp         0avio       173k   resolver
  317942      79.29re      13.33cp         0avio       190k   formail
  316133      49.29re       7.98cp         0avio       173k   md5sum
  314306      22.57re       7.75cp         0avio       172k   renice
  314311     201.25re       4.94cp         0avio       246k   dynamic-check*
    1304      90.22re       0.35cp         0avio       362k   stunnel
    1816      72.22re       0.33cp         0avio       185k   popa3d
    1770       7.49re       0.33cp         0avio       246k   dynamic-blackli

That is, POP3 sessions account for about 20% of all mail-related load
on this server.

This sample of data is for a 24 hours period.  This is an SMP server,
so the fact that the CPU times above add up to almost 24 hours does
not mean the server is overloaded, -- but it is quite loaded indeed.

-- 
Alexander Peslyak <solar@...nwall.com>
GPG key ID: B35D3598  fp: 6429 0D7E F130 C13E C929  6447 73C3 A290 B35D 3598
http://www.openwall.com - bringing security into open computing environments

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