Dovecot performance tuning
==========================

Disk I/O optimization
---------------------

Usually heavily loaded IMAP and POP3 servers don't use much CPU, but they use
all the disk I/O they can get. So reducing disk I/O is probably the most useful
optimization you can do.

 * See <MailLocation.LocalDisk.txt> for generic disk I/O optimizations.
 * See <MailLocation.Mbox.txt> for mbox-specific optimizations.
 * See <MailLocation.Maildir.txt> for Maildir-specific optimizations.
 * See <dbox> [MailboxFormat.dbox.txt] for Dovecot's own high-performance
   mailbox format. It usually gives much better performance than mbox/Maildir.
 * See <full text search indexes> [Plugins.FTS.txt] for optimizing IMAP SEARCH
   command.
 * See <POP3Server.txt> for POP3 optimizations, especially
   'pop3_no_flag_updates=yes'
 * 'mailbox_list_index=yes' can help a lot by replying to IMAP STATUS (and
   similar) lookups from a single index without having to open each mailbox
   index separately. This is the default in v2.3+.
    * Also 'mailbox_list_index_very_dirty_syncs=yes' makes Dovecot assume that
      the list index is up-to-date.
 * 'mail_prefetch_count' setting may be helpful with some mailbox formats
 * 'mail_location = ...:VOLATILEDIR=/tmp/dovecot-volatile/%2.256Nu/%u' moves
   e.g. lock files to the volatile directory. This is helpful especially if
   mail_location otherwise points to a remote filesystem like NFS. (v2.2.32+)
 * If acl plugin is used, but only global ACLs are needed, set
   'acl_globals_only=yes' (v2.2.31+)

CPU usage optimization
----------------------

 * See <LoginProcess.txt> for optimizing CPU usage caused by logins
 * See 'auth_cache_size' setting for caching passdb and userdb lookups
    * To distribute password hash calculations to multiple CPU cores (via
      auth-worker processes), set 'auth_cache_verify_password_with_worker=yes'
      (v2.2.34+)
 * Services having client_limit>1 and process_limit>1, set process_min_avail to
   the number of CPU cores
 * To reduce forks by reusing existing processes for new requests increase
   'service { service_count }' from 1 to higher (e.g. 100) for imap and pop3
   services. It's better not to set it too high or unlimited (0), because
   different users use different amounts of memory, and it's wasteful when a
   lot of processes end up having a lot of "free" memory.

Memory usage optimization
-------------------------

There aren't many settings which affect Dovecot's memory usage. In general
Dovecot uses as much memory as it needs, which is usually quite little.

 * 'auth_cache_size' controls maximum memory size for caching passdb/userdb
   lookups
 * <High-performance mode for login processes> [LoginProcess.txt].
 * 'imap_hibernate_timeout' controls when to move IDLEing IMAP connections to
   wait for changes in a shared imap-hibernate process. This frees up the imap
   process.

Note that these settings do not directly affect the memory usage:

 * 'service { vsz_limit } ': These are simply safe guards against potential
   memory leaks. If the process's virtual size reaches the limit, the process
   is killed by the kernel.
 * 'service { process_limit, client_limit } ': These are mostly to avoid DoS
   attacks using up all your memory.

(This file was created from the wiki on 2019-06-19 12:42)