100-500 user machine specs

[su_A_ve]

1K users on this box... This is a dual xeon x5365 with 8gigs for the grownups

top - 12:58:32 up 12 days,  6:41,  2 users,  load average: 0.55, 0.36, 0.37
Tasks: 223 total,   1 running, 222 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  7.3% us,  0.5% sy,  0.0% ni, 91.9% id,  0.2% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.1% si
Mem:   8160668k total,  7934412k used,   226256k free,   248196k buffers
Swap: 16777208k total,      176k used, 16777032k free,  3959576k cached

10K users on this one... dual Xeon 5160 with 8 gigs for the kids

top - 13:02:41 up 12 days,  5:30,  1 user,  load average: 1.86, 1.51, 1.25
Tasks: 218 total,   1 running, 217 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 27.8% us,  2.6% sy,  0.0% ni, 60.6% id,  8.7% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.2% si
Mem:   8165728k total,  8119988k used,    45740k free,    67504k buffers
Swap: 16779884k total,      256k used, 16779628k free,  2638624k cached

(Just noticed some high utilization from mysql - hmm)

[GPGeek]

OK - My RAID move is planned for this weekend. We're moving to new hardware so might as well take advantage of the on-board RAID.

We are also going to add an IronPort appliance for spam filtering. The built in is good but I'm noticing that when we disable spam filtering the performance jumps up again.

Playing with Amazon EC2 is next as a long term solution to scalability and reliability.

[bonadio]

Hello su_A_ve

What type of disks are you using and what type of raid?

Thanks

[jlhs5]

I have a VM(Ubuntu) on Vmware Windows as Host, 2 processor and 1GB Ram, 40 GB HD, for 110 users, and work very good

[rotorboy]

Alright... well here's where I've ended up starting. I started over as the VM I was testing on had to be dumped and used for another task. So now I'm trying out Zimbra on an Intel Q6600 with 8GB RAM and 2x320GB SATAII Seagate HDD's running a software RAID 1.

I realize that the drives are my bottleneck, but in this case it's what I had handy at the time... based on what I'm reading here I hope to get on towards 500 users and by that time I can switch to iSCSI or whatever.

That machine with 10K users.... what are you running for drives?

[Viking0]

Hi,
I have just brought up an Dell server with an Quad Core 2.33 Ghz and 4 Gb Ram, Raid 1 (HW) 300 Gb. Running Zimbra 5.0.8 on Debian.

would this server be too small for 800 active accounts.

I Have an identicall server (In hardware) running postfix + amavis + sa + clam + cyrus +etc with 700 active acounts and no problem, but I'm worried about zimbra.
Without no user connected it uses 1.3 Gb

[dwmtractor]

Your server specs look great except I'm not sure about the RAM, you might want to double the 4GB to 8 GB just to cut your use of swap files.

RAM on Zimbra is a bit deceptive. You really have a questionable system with less than 2GB even on a 1- or 2-user test environment, but then it scales a long way with no additional RAM requirements. I would think you'll find a bit of heavy swapping going on with 800 accounts on 4GB though due to some of the advanced Java that's going on with the Zimbra client.

That said the foundation of your server should not break a sweat based on what I have read from other users on this forum.

[Viking0]

Thanks for you answer dwmtractor.

If I could not double my ram inmediatly, what would be your recomendations.
¿Any function that I could easly disable?

Most of the users would use pop3 service only, only 10 - 20 user would use the webmail client,no IMAP clients, and 1 - 5 admin.

Thanks

[su_A_ve]

Go to 8GB. And put 64bit version...

[dwmtractor]

Thanks for you answer dwmtractor.

If I could not double my ram inmediatly, what would be your recomendations.
¿Any function that I could easly disable?

Most of the users would use pop3 service only, only 10 - 20 user would use the webmail client,no IMAP clients, and 1 - 5 admin.

Thanks

I'd just go ahead and use it with 4GB and watch the swap usage. It'll be a little slower depending how many people try to access at once, but the big thing based on the user profile you describe would just be throughput of the spam and virus filters, because pop really doesn't use much horsepower. And the filters would not be a huge issue, they could just result in a little delay if you had a sudden surge of messages--no biggie.