On Wed, Jan 19, 2000 at 08:59:02AM +0000, Simon Rae wrote:
> Could anyone give me a rough indication of how many user accounts my
> qmail server can handle (using passwd) before I'd need to start looking
> at implementing a cdb or MySQL for POP verification?
It really depends on how your OS handles the /etc/passwd database.
Systems like Solaris and linux use a plain text /etc/passwd, scanned
linearly. This will slow down as the numbers of users goes up. However,
if the file is cached in RAM, then it doesn't matter too much, but the
search is still linear. The BSDs on the other hand make a DB database
out of the /etc/passwd, and so it's much faster to lookup.
> I run qmail on RH6 Linux on a PII 350 with 128 meg RAM with oodles of
> disk space.
There isn't a particular figure, but as a rule of thumb, I would go up
to 10,000 accounts in /etc/passwd. After that, you'd probably have to
consider alternatives.... or switch to a BSD ;-)
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