On Mon, Sep 06, 1999 at 02:10:49PM +0100, Chris McCarthy wrote:
> My company wants to provide users on the internet with a free email
> service ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). We'll be starting off with about
> 3,000 users, potentially growing up to 10,000 in the next 12 months.
10,000 isn't that big a number. qmail should be able to handle that
easily.
> How feasible is it to create a passwd/shadow entry for each user,
> providing them with POP/IMAP access ? (or maybe just pop if imap puts
> too much load on the server).
putting all those users into passwd/shadow may very well work, but it
would depend highly on the OS. Some OS's like solaris have a text
passwd/shadow file, which needs to be scanned linearly every time a
lookup is required, and it starts to get slow as the numbers of entries
increase, especially if it is not cached in memory. the BSDs build their
passwd file into a DB for fast lookups. You might want to investigate
that. A better idea would be to put your users into a CDB, which can be
looked up very quickly. Look around on the qmail homepage for
checkpasswords that use CDB, and ideas on building a POP toaster using a
single unix uid.
> With the passwd and shadow files containing so many entries, will the
> password lookups take forever ?
>
> Our current server spec is a PIII 400, 256M, but we'll replace it with a
> high spec server if/when needed.
Should be OK to start with. You may want to add more memory to it later,
but if it's only doing email, it should be just fine. More importantly,
you should be using fast SCSI disks with it.
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