I have run qpopper in HA/high scale environments. Yes, efficiency could be improved. However, it is one of the few POP3 daemons that implement XTND XMIT functionality. The client-base at the time was pure Eudora and we could give them POP3-only access using qpopper, over an SSH tunnel. For this, we needed XTND XMIT and qpopper is the only readily available POP3 daemon that delivers it. It is, in fact, the reference standard for that functionality. The theoretical limit, on most Unix kernels, is 64K users. This is only because the internal representation of the uuid is usually an int. On 64-bit kernels, it is much higher because the definition of "int" is bigger. In reality, the max capacity of the host is strictly dependent on the hardware architecture, how many concurrent sessions, and what the users are actually doing with each session. Your 5000 user limit, based on /etc/passwd, is bogus. For example, on Intel hardware, you will never approach even 500 concurrent shell users (developers) without the silicon melting down. However, a Sun e10K can handle 5000 of such users easily. That same Intel box can handle over 10000 mailboxen, if you give it enough disk space (RAID0 spool) and memory (RAM cache) [but not on a single 56Kbps port <g>].
Dmitri Krioukov: Monday, May 29, 2000 8:43 AM
qpopper was written without even slightest thought about performance issues. there is a lot of other pop3 daemons written much more efficiently. (i don't any other that would perform worse than qpopper). try cucipop, for example. it was written by the same guy who wrote procmail. the source code is unreadable in both cases.
Muljawan Hendrianto: Friday, May 26, 2000 5:38 AM
I would like to have your opinions regarding pop server set-up in an ISP environment, what would be the common software used, authentication type etc.
I am thinking about using QPOPPER+procmail, but some people say that it is not scalable because its authentication is based on /etc/passwd. And in Unix environment there is certain recommendation not to have more than 5000 users in /etc/passwd file.