Fastest IMAP server

Hello,

I've been using Courier IMAP server for years and I think it's time to
change . The *real* alternatives are Cyrus and Dovecot (feel free to
add a new one), mainly based on performance. Cyrus has a very good
reputation in speed (the fastest?) and Dovecot seems secure and also
speedy (perhaps slower than Cyrus, though). Have you got stats /
reports / performance tests or is there any (more or less recent)
performance comparison between most common Unix IMAP server
implementations?

I would also be interested in comparisons by:
- security (I guess Dovecot is the winner)
- computer resources (which one is taking more memory, CPU, etc?).

Thanks in advance.
-r

What are your requirements? Lots of users? Lots of mailboxes? Large
messages? Network storage of mail?

Those factors (among others) will greatly affect performance.

"RM" <roman.medina@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:a8a8e1da-bbe2-419f-8e9e-a77b47778951@m73g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
> Hello,
>
> I've been using Courier IMAP server for years and I think it's time to
> change . The *real* alternatives are Cyrus and Dovecot (feel free to
> add a new one), mainly based on performance. Cyrus has a very good
> reputation in speed (the fastest?) and Dovecot seems secure and also
> speedy (perhaps slower than Cyrus, though). Have you got stats /
> reports / performance tests or is there any (more or less recent)
> performance comparison between most common Unix IMAP server
> implementations?
>
> I would also be interested in comparisons by:
> - security (I guess Dovecot is the winner)
> - computer resources (which one is taking more memory, CPU, etc?).

It's for a hosting environment so expect multiple domains, many users,
etc. Right now the environment is small but I expect the solution to
be scalable. Perhaps (only perhaps) Cyrus would be better for big
deployments and Dovecot is perfect for small ones? Anyway, I'd like to
have some real data (if there's no comparisons or papers, at least I'd
like to hear from your experiences) for helping me in the decission.
For instance, if Dovecot is *much* more light (in term of resources:
mem, cpu,. ...) than Cyrus and speed is comparable, I could think on
using Dovecot now and let the Cyrus choice for the future (when the
environment grows). If not, perhaps it would be good to use Cyrus from
the beginning.

I'm not an IMAP expert, I only expect a fairly speedy IMAP(&POP3)
server, more or less secure (I guess Dovecot is more secure, but the
question is "how much" insecure is Cyrus?), Sieve support (both of
them support it, I think), "performance-friendly" and nothing more
(normal hard disk storage, no nfs, etc).

What do you think? I suppose that "it depends" but that's why I'd like
to have more info to compare them...

Cheers,
-Román


On 4 ago, 18:46, "Bill Kearney" <wkearne...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> What are your requirements? Lots of users? Lots of mailboxes? Large
> messages? Network storage of mail?
>
> Those factors (among others) will greatly affect performance.
>
> "RM" <roman.med...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:a8a8e1da-bbe2-419f-8e9e-a77b47778951@m73g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>
> > Hello,
>
> > I've been using Courier IMAP server for years and I think it's time to
> > change . The *real* alternatives are Cyrus and Dovecot (feel free to
> > add a new one), mainly based on performance. Cyrus has a very good
> > reputation in speed (the fastest?) and Dovecot seems secure and also
> > speedy (perhaps slower than Cyrus, though). Have you got stats /
> > reports / performance tests or is there any (more or less recent)
> > performance comparison between most common Unix IMAP server
> > implementations?
>
> > I would also be interested in comparisons by:
> > - security (I guess Dovecot is the winner)
> > - computer resources (which one is taking more memory, CPU, etc?).

RM <roman.medina@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would also be interested in comparisons by:
> - computer resources (which one is taking more memory, CPU, etc?).

The only results that I have so far are for bincimap. This is spawned by
inetd, so does not use any resources when not in use. A spawned session
results are as follows:

VIRT RES SHR %CPU %MEM
3236 1588 1360 0.0 1.2

Please post back on here if you have resource measurements from other
packages, so that I can update the comparison table.

http://markhobley.yi.org:8000/MailMSDWhich

Regards,

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley,
393 Quinton Road West,
Quinton, BIRMINGHAM.
B32 1QE.

On Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:43:43 -0700, RM wrote:

> It's for a hosting environment so expect multiple domains, many users,
> etc. Right now the environment is small but I expect the solution to be
> scalable. Perhaps (only perhaps) Cyrus would be better for big
> deployments and Dovecot is perfect for small ones?

Depends on how you set it up. There are some Dovecot installations with
millions of users. There's no built-in replication yet like Cyrus has,
but it should be coming soon too.

> Anyway, I'd like to
> have some real data (if there's no comparisons or papers, at least I'd
> like to hear from your experiences) for helping me in the decission. For
> instance, if Dovecot is *much* more light (in term of resources: mem,
> cpu,. ...) than Cyrus and speed is comparable, I could think on using
> Dovecot now and let the Cyrus choice for the future (when the
> environment grows). If not, perhaps it would be good to use Cyrus from
> the beginning.

I don't know of anyone who has switched from Cyrus to Dovecot (or vice
versa) and given any statistics about how the resource usage changed.
Real-world benchmarking isn't easy to do either:
http://imapwiki.org/Benchmarking

There are some theoretical reasons why I believe Dovecot is (or can be)
faster than Cyrus, but I don't know if those matter with real-world
clients.

> I'm not an IMAP expert, I only expect a fairly speedy IMAP(&POP3)
> server, more or less secure (I guess Dovecot is more secure, but the
> question is "how much" insecure is Cyrus?),

Dovecot uses several different processes, each running with minimal
privileges. Cyrus uses only processes that have access to all users' all
mails all the time. So in theory a security bug in Dovecot (or a library
it depends on, like OpenSSL) should be less destructive, but that also
requires there are no OS kernel security holes that can be exploited..

Then there are the implementation bugs, but those can't be measured as
easily.

> Sieve support (both of them support it, I think),

Dovecot currently uses the same Sieve implementation as Cyrus, although a
new more featureful implementation is getting close to being finished.

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Timo Sirainen posted:
> Real-world benchmarking isn't easy to do either:
> http://imapwiki.org/Benchmarking

Timo makes an excellent point. If there was a clear winner among all the
IMAP servers out there, the others would be extinct.

You'll notice that many IMAP server developers, people like Timo
(Dovecot), Ken & etc. (Cyrus), and myself (Panda, formerly UW), will hedge
our answers and even go so far as to recommend our competition if it looks
like the user would be happier with that server. It isn't that we don't
think that our own server is the "best"; rather, it's that we optimized
for different segments of the market.

Since you're doing a multi-domain hosting environment and you want to hack
things as little as possible, I think that Dovecot would be a good match.
You could do it with UW/Panda, but you'd need to do some hacking for the
multi-domain and you'd need some non-standard settings (especially the
mailbox format) to make it scale well. Cyrus may be a bit too complex on
administration.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.