From owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jul 7 03:30:38 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: isp@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C839416A4E8 for ; Fri, 7 Jul 2006 03:30:38 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from fcash@ocis.net) Received: from smtp.sd73.bc.ca (smtp.sd73.bc.ca [142.24.13.140]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0817D43D5D for ; Fri, 7 Jul 2006 03:30:36 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from fcash@ocis.net) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by localhost.sd73.bc.ca (Postfix) with ESMTP id A8B018A0021; Thu, 6 Jul 2006 20:37:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from smtp.sd73.bc.ca ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (smtp.sd73.bc.ca [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 25614-02-16; Thu, 6 Jul 2006 20:37:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from webmail.sd73.bc.ca (unknown [10.10.10.17]) by smtp.sd73.bc.ca (Postfix) with ESMTP id 54A4D8A0034; Thu, 6 Jul 2006 20:37:40 -0700 (PDT) Received: from webmail.sd73.bc.ca (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by webmail.sd73.bc.ca (Postfix) with ESMTP id 140859000607; Thu, 6 Jul 2006 20:30:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from 24.71.118.34 (SquirrelMail authenticated user fcash) by webmail.sd73.bc.ca with HTTP; Thu, 6 Jul 2006 20:30:20 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <63675.24.71.118.34.1152243020.squirrel@webmail.sd73.bc.ca> In-Reply-To: References: Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 20:30:20 -0700 (PDT) From: "Freddie Cash" To: "Francisco Reyes" User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.5.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new using ClamAV at sd73.bc.ca Cc: isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: IAMP servers in FreeBSD for ISP X-BeenThere: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: fcash@ocis.net List-Id: Internet Services Providers List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2006 03:30:38 -0000 On Thu, July 6, 2006 7:52 pm, Francisco Reyes wrote: > Anyone care to share what IMAP servers they have found to scale best? > > > We are currently using courier and at times it seems it really will > not scale well into thousands of emails. > > We have basically one setup with self contained machines that do all > the work and a second setup where we break the load into MX machines, > NFS to store the maildir for courier and front end machines to run > courier and NFS. > > We can handle hundreds of accounts in the self contained, more or > less ok (depending on the mix of pop or imap). > > The second setup is more complex to meassure since the load is > distributed. The biggest problem with this second setup is that the > front end machines end up needing to mount several of the Maildir NFS > servers and we have found that one of the NFS servers going down can > affect all of the front end machines. > > What have others found to scale well and what kind of hardware are > you using? We used to use Courier IMAP, but then we found that it didn't handle directories with more than 15,000 messages too well. Especially with lots of threads in there. We moved to Cyrus IMAP, and haven't had issues since. Some of our users have 1.5 GB message stores, others are pushing 25,000 messages in single folders. We currently have less than 100 users on the mail server, but we hope to move over all 1600 from the other three servers they are currently on. The really nice thing about Cyrus is that you can cluster mail servers using the MURDER protocol to get a single unified account namespace across distributed systems. Sounds very cool, and gives you an upgrade path (just add servers as needed). Our IMAP server is currently running 64-bit Debian testing, Postfix, Cyrus IMAP, IMAP Proxy, Apache2, PHP, and SquirrelMail. Hardware is a Tyan K8SD-Pro (S2882) motherboard, 4 GB ECC DDR-SDRAM, 3Ware Escalade 9550SX 4-port RAID controller, 4x 150 GB SATA HD in RAID5, Broadcom Tygon3 GigE NIC. We initially had issues with Apache hogging all the RAM, but after tuning things we haven't had any issues. Don't expect we'll have issues until all 1600 accounts are on there, and then we can start moving services off to other servers (move SquirrelMail to a separate box, add IMAP servers using MURDER, etc). ---- Freddie Cash fcash@ocis.net