Re: POP Server

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2001 at 10:23:17AM +0200, Antonio Godinho wrote:
> Does qpopper run as a daemon? does qmail-pop3d run as a 
> daemon as well? and which do you recommend better?

I think you may be worrying unnecessarily about the cost of running from
inetd. I have built a very large mail server which runs Courier pop3d; this
in turn is launched from couriertcpd (effectively another inetd). It's not a
problem.

A standalone daemon will 'fork'; inetd will 'fork' and 'exec'. I agree this
is more work. However, POP3 daemons tend to be small and have simple or no
config files, so they don't have to do much work when they start up (unlike
launching, say, sendmail from inetd).

Note that there are much more serious bottlenecks you will come across in a
POP server than inetd. The biggest one in my opinion is if people keep their
mail on the server, and it's all in a single mailbox file. A mailbox file
has to be read all the way from one end to the other every time the user
connects; if they have 10MB of mail on the server, and are checking every 30
seconds, then this becomes a big resource drain.

The other is likely to be disk and RAM - with modern processors I would be
very surprised if a POP3 server became CPU-bound.

Regards,

Brian.

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