Hardware and protocol for performances ?

[Christophe Laumond <cl...@motet.dk>]

hello,

We have some questions about the hardware we should use, but we have not 
the possibilities to test the different situations. If you can speak 
about your experience in order to make a choice, it would be very usefull.

Our mail system  have 200-300 000 users, so what is better to use :
- a single computer with a good configuration, and in this case, what is 
the necesary configuration (CPU, RAM, Hard disk, network flow) ?
- at least two computer, one with database, another with James. And so 
what is the necesary configurations ?
- a farm of computer with several computer, and so the number of 
computers and their configurations and roles ?

Actually, we principaly use the POP3 ans SMTP fonctionnalities, do you 
think that the IMAP can afford better performance for this number of 
user ? Or should we use a direct access to the database ?

Thanks a lot for your responses.

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Re: Hardware and protocol for performances ?

[Danny Angus <da...@gmail.com>]

I think it also depends upon how much mail these people get.

I would think that with hundreds of thousands of users you will be
looking for high availability as well as capacity, and in order to
achieve this I would suggest that you use a clustered database (I'm
not about to recommend anything I'm not a dba) and in front of that
have at least two instances of James.

It is more likely that you would want to have two tiers of Jameses the
front tier inside your firewall performing spam/virus filtering and
forwarding all traffic onto a second tier which performs routing and
delivery.

If your database is HA you can share the db between both tiers, or (if
you were using something like Oracle RAQ or on "big iron") have two db
instances run on the same set of hardware.

You may also want to have secondary servers in a remote location
capable of accepting and queueing incoming mail when your primary site
is down.

Your hardware options shouldn't be limited by James, but a James
architecture on many low capacity boxes may lead you into more complex
set-up.

see http://wiki.apache.org/james/SmartOrSecondaryHost for some ideas
on how to start thinking about a big installation.

d.



On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:39:30 +0400, Christophe Laumond <cl...@motet.dk> wrote:
> hello,
> 
> We have some questions about the hardware we should use, but we have not
> the possibilities to test the different situations. If you can speak
> about your experience in order to make a choice, it would be very usefull.
> 
> Our mail system  have 200-300 000 users, so what is better to use :
> - a single computer with a good configuration, and in this case, what is
> the necesary configuration (CPU, RAM, Hard disk, network flow) ?
> - at least two computer, one with database, another with James. And so
> what is the necesary configurations ?
> - a farm of computer with several computer, and so the number of
> computers and their configurations and roles ?
> 
> Actually, we principaly use the POP3 ans SMTP fonctionnalities, do you
> think that the IMAP can afford better performance for this number of
> user ? Or should we use a direct access to the database ?
> 
> Thanks a lot for your responses.
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: server-dev-unsubscribe@james.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: server-dev-help@james.apache.org
> 
>

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