One of our clients is using fetchmail to access their 150 POP accounts. They have it set to poll all of these accounts simultaneously every 15 minutes. Based on the default configuration of Dovecot, this results in about 600 pop3-login processes hanging around on our system. This seems to be contributing to some recent performance problems we're experiencing.
This request is really for two related RFEs. First, is there anything we can do to tune Dovecot so this doesn't happen? I see a few config options in dovecot.conf pertaining to the login processes, but aside from turning off separate process per login (which they say is a potential security issue), I'm not sure how to configure the other options to improve the situation. Incidentally, I have asked the client to reconfigure their fetchmail setup to stagger the logins instead of doing them all at once, but I'd like to protect the server also if possible.
The second request is to add a process count to the Virtualmin System Information page. It would be useful to see this information before it becomes a major issue, and the current counters don't give any hints that it is happening.
Thanks,
Alan