On Sat, 26 Dec 1998 16:53:34 -0700, Sean Rietze wrote:
>Is anyone out there using databases (Oracle, Sybase, mySQL) for pop3
>authentication? If so, can you let me know any performance or related
>issues that you underwent to make this happen.
>We currently have about 35k email accounts and performance is great.
I've done some testing for other purposes with mySQL with ezmlm.
Compared to ezmlm's mechanism (which hashes the address 53 ways, then
inserts it in order into that file, or reads that file serially until
found) mySQL lookups are about the same speed (I run 17K lookups and
can't see a significant difference) and insert/delete considerably
faster when you start to have many addresses (say 20,000 or so). mySQL
does not perform as well when you retrieve large amounts of data
row-wise, when compared to just copying the 53 files, but it's quite
acceptable and you'll deal with individual addresses anyway.
All this with mySQL on the same server, so no TCP/IP.
The mySQL C API is very straight forward. Error messages pretty good.
Docs ok.
Look at Bruce Guenter's vmailmgr package (via qmail www site). He uses
a checkpassword replacement as the core of the system. Setting it up
like that, you can make all your pop/imap users virtual users on a
machine. Just rewrite the checkpassword-equivalent for mySQL.
www.tcx.se has some benchmarks on the databases. I can't imagine that
Oracle/Sybase can be as fast, easy to set up, and resource conserving.
-Sincerely, Fred
(Frederik Lindberg, Infectious Diseases, WashU, St. Louis, MO, USA)
