Scalable Mail solution with NAS

Wed Jan 31 20:05:08 UTC 2001

[ This belongs in comp.mail.misc. ]

>>>>> "Sebastien" == Sebastien Berube <sberube at zeroknowledge.com> writes:

    Sebastien> 2. The more mailboxes you have, the slower the entire
    Sebastien> popping process will be.  The reason is very simple,
    Sebastien> each pop process will spawn and read your mailbox
    Sebastien> directory.

You have a highly deficient pop server implementation. The fork-on-connect
model is dead. A well written threaded server can handle tens of thousands
of concurrent connections.

    Sebastien> /export/mailboxes/j/o/h/n/johndoe.mbox

That just moves the problem around. Traversing those intermediate
directories isn't exactly a light-weight set of operations.

    Sebastien> Although this example is not good in the case where you
    Sebastien> accept usernames with 3 or less characters.

A proper hashing algorithm would solve that.

--lyndon