Zimbra Hardware performance and upgradation

[mansuper]

Hi

I entered successfully into 2nd month of using Zimbra Network edition 4.0.1 . As an admin I have a question regarding Zimbra performance. Many of my new users are complaining on Zimbra's performance especially while using the webbrowser.
Following is the ouput for df -h

[zimbra@testl ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
74G 41G 29G 59% /
/dev/hda1 99M 12M 82M 13% /boot
none 506M 0 506M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/shm 150M 0 150M 0% /opt/zimbra/amavisd-new-2.3.3/tmp
/dev/shm 150M 188K 150M 1% /opt/zimbra/amavisd-new-2.4.1/tmp

The Zimbra server's RAM is 1GB. As you can see that 59% of the space got used, I am afraid to add users any more. I would like to get a suggestion on increasing Zimbra performance, hardware performance and the disk size. Are there any specials steps or rules to follow in doing so?

[phoenix]

Your memory is at the bottom of the required specification and you don't say what processor you've got. Lots more memory and a seperate raid array for the zimbra files would be my suggestion.

[mansuper]

I got P 4 processor. I will upgrade my RAM soon. If I upgrade my Hard Disk, is there any configuration to do in Zimbra to increase its volume?

[phoenix]

If you mean just replacing your current hd with another one then, no, there would be nothing to do. You could add another drive and move /opt/zimbra to that and add a symlink to the new location. If really depends on how many users and how important your mail is, a raid array would be the best for performance (raid10, I think) and safety for the zimbra files with mirrored drives for the operating system.

[mansuper]

What do you mean by "move /opt/zimbra to that and add a symlink to the new location"?

Does it mean that I need to just cut and paste the /opt/zimbra to the new drive ? If so will it work then?

How do I add a symlink to the new location?

[jholder]

Are your users using ie6 or FF?

IE6 has some bad speed issues, and horrible memory management. IE7 is a little better, but still not as good as FF.

For more details, see the latest blog entry under "COMMUNITY".

How many users?

I have 1 GIG and 150 users, and speed is good here *with FF

[alivebyscience]

I'm running a single server, dual opterons, 4gig of memory. There's no integration, ldap wise, with a network somewhere - it's completely stand alone.

It sure doesn't snap to, and I'm the only user today (just before cutting over the whole company).

It may be my office DSL - who knows? Just the same...

What services can I disable?
antispam - sure, but we want that.
antivirus - sure, but we want that.
ldap - I'm not integrating zimbra with anything - its all alone in the world.
logger - if I have the OSS version I don't have mail trace - do I need this?
mailbox - hmmm. I wonder.
mta - of course it's needed.
snmp - nope. don't think this is needed.
spell - Nice, but surely optional. Not a resident deal, is it?

Sooo. What can I toss overboard? ldap? Snmp? How much will I actually gain back in CPU cycles and memory conservation?

[phoenix]

Have you looked at what might be consuming resources? Is zimbra the only application running on this server? Which o/s? With that spec you should get good performance.

[alivebyscience]

I gave my server specs... Forgot to mention RAID 1 SATA 2 300gig drives.

OS? CentOS 4.3 or 4.4 (not sure).

I'm using FF for a browser (v1.5.0.7) on my laptop running XP sp2, patched, 2gig of memory, 1.6 centrino cpu, and Trend Micro office scan (usually not a resource pig).

Here's a snapshot of top

top - 21:34:05 up 14 days, 22:39, 1 user, load average: 0.13, 0.09, 0.02
Tasks: 138 total, 1 running, 137 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 15.3% us, 3.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 81.5% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 4090588k total, 2842844k used, 1247744k free, 97624k buffers
Swap: 4200888k total, 0k used, 4200888k free, 1619416k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
13880 zimbra 19 0 464m 21m 10m S 22.3 0.6 0:00.67 java
13619 root 16 0 3144 972 744 R 0.3 0.0 0:00.11 top
1 root 16 0 2040 512 436 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.25 init


It's performing better now for me than earlier this afternoon. It's now live (dns has propogated over), and I'm on a home DSL - that's all that's changed.

Top above shows java at 22.3% CPU usage. That's an unusually heavy percentage for java.

Some of the performance difference between earlier and now appears to be due to my lousy office network (heavily loaded).

Again, this is all before Zimbra live day. I have 270 users, so at most this evening there's the odd email now and again. And the spam.

We're moving from a qmail/vpopmail/squirrel webmail/clamav/spamassassin stack that's been a good, solid email server. No real complaints. The reason to make a move was time to migrate to a new server, and we chose Zimbra for it's forward thinking design. Right on!! We're looking forward to more of the same!