On Aug 14, 2008, at 2:38 PM, Giorgenes Gelatti wrote:
I've been studying dovecot for replacing my company's current system and I got a little worried about an aspect of the dovecot's design. I was surprised that dovecot doesn't use prefork for its mail processes, forking a new processes for each new client connection.
Login processes are preforked and they can also be configured to keep reusing existing processes. But yes, post-login imap/pop3 processes aren't preforked because it would require a larger redesign of the master process. Which is actually what I have been planning on doing for v2.0 for a long time now.
But there are even some theoretical problems with preforking. For example the most secure way to set up your users is to use a different UNIX UID for each user. So for preforking that means your preforked processes must run as root until they receive the information about which UID they need to run as. And the code running as root should be minimized..
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