100-500 user machine specs

[rotorboy]

dwmtractor: I think the version is "Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0" but I'm not sure if it's under "Help" and then "Version" where you find the working version info.

The installer was: /zcs-NETWORK-5.0.2_GA_1975.RHEL5_64.20080130215
So that looks like 5.0.2

reza225: I knew that I was testing on a VPS and that I'd probably end up using a dedicated machine should we decide to go ahead with the system. I haven't experienced this kind of RAM issue using Xen + CentOS VPS's before, but perhaps Java and VPS don't get along as well as they could.

If we roll with this we'll end up putting it, at the least, on a 2.4Ghz P4 w/3GB RAM + 3ware RAID 10 (SATA) over 4 drives. I think a Core 2 Duo/Quad will be a better choice though... so we can scale up to 8GB RAM if needed.

I've rebooted and currently it's sitting at ~1.9GB used... Thanks everyone for your responses... I'm going to try adding another 500MB RAM just to see how it responds, then give it a few days to see how it goes.

[dwmtractor]

Originally Posted by rotorboy

If we roll with this we'll end up putting it, at the least, on a 2.4Ghz P4 w/3GB RAM + 3ware RAID 10 (SATA) over 4 drives. I think a Core 2 Duo/Quad will be a better choice though... so we can scale up to 8GB RAM if needed.

That's probably overkill for your user base, but it'll certainly run smoothly.

If you haven't already, check out the System Requirements document.

Cheers,

Dan

[p24t]

Hah, that's not overkill! I have 75 users on a 8-way xeon 2.83g box with 16g of RAM.

I thought it was a bit much, but I don't have to worry for a long, long time.

[dwmtractor]

Originally Posted by p24t

Hah, that's not overkill! I have 75 users on a 8-way xeon 2.83g box with 16g of RAM.

I thought it was a bit much, but I don't have to worry for a long, long time.

Sheesh, that's not just overkill, that's the nuclear option for a mosquito!

[rotorboy]

Well I think I'll save the Core2 for something else then... I'd hate to overkill my mail server...

[GPGeek]

Originally Posted by p24t

Hah, that's not overkill! I have 75 users on a 8-way xeon 2.83g box with 16g of RAM.

I thought it was a bit much, but I don't have to worry for a long, long time.

I think your setup is ideal - I just can't afford to jump in that big just yet.

I'm running 2 Opterions and 8GB of ram for just under 100 users all using the advanced web client.

This system is mission critical and talking our group of clients from their comfortable Outlook took a lot of persuading so the responsiveness of the system needed to be rock solid.

Best way to do that for a web app is usually lots of CPU, Ram and Fast Drives.

The web client eats up quite a bit of Ram and bumping the ram from 2GB to 8GB we saw a noticeable improvement. Could have went with 4GB but why not 8GB (memory is cheap). Also our other biggest performance boost was moving to 10k drives and dropping the hardware RAID.

A simpler system, not fully fault tolerant but made it more responsive. To be honest I have gotten very good at installing Zimbra and configuring it to our settings so if we did have a drive fail we could be up and running in a few hours or less.

Throw as much power at the system as you can afford and you'll sleep better at night.

-JB

[rotorboy]

Well that's something to think about... except the HW RAID.... I'm not sure I would walk away from at least a RAID 1... on 10k drives perhaps.

Thanks!!

[dwmtractor]

Originally Posted by GPGeek

The web client eats up quite a bit of Ram and bumping the ram from 2GB to 8GB we saw a noticeable improvement. Could have went with 4GB but why not 8GB (memory is cheap). Also our other biggest performance boost was moving to 10k drives and dropping the hardware RAID.

A simpler system, not fully fault tolerant but made it more responsive. To be honest I have gotten very good at installing Zimbra and configuring it to our settings so if we did have a drive fail we could be up and running in a few hours or less.

Throw as much power at the system as you can afford and you'll sleep better at night.

-JB

With all due respect, I couldn't possibly sleep at night without some form of RAID for my HDD. I'm using Linux software RAID myself because Ubuntu 6 didn't install properly on my prior Adaptec HW RAID, but I wanted mirroring so badly I was willing to take a slight performance hit.

The HDD is probably the most failure-prone item in your whole server (at least that has been my experience) so you need fault-tolerance there if anywhere IMHO.

[langs]

This is top on my 225 user setup;

top - 10:01:20 up 684 days, 17:28, 4 users, load average: 0.50, 0.51, 0.47
Tasks: 170 total, 1 running, 169 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3% us, 0.2% sy, 0.0% ni, 93.5% id, 0.2% wa, 0.0% hi, 5.8% si
Mem: 4060124k total, 3964836k used, 95288k free, 72840k buffers
Swap: 12578768k total, 148k used, 12578620k free, 692432k cached

I never see swap getting used.

[Mike Scholes]

I have a test rig with 5 users, 4gb ram 5.0.5 and F7, raid 1 on a couple of "nothing special" SATA drives. In fact it was a Dell server offer, we only paid £240 UK for it. It's been up for 70 days so plenty of time for swap to accumulate but it's not swapping and it performs well. The best performance boost we had was to use Firefox 3 beta 5.