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Originally Posted by ryandball  The reason I ask is I remember when I worked for the (then) largest ISP in the northwest in late 2000, they had 3 Sun servers for email doing round robin, running SunOS I believe, and I think they were only like 80 MHz with 512 MB RAM, but they handled email for 50,000 customers and only got slow when we got hit by massive spam storms (like millions at a time). |
What *exactly* was that cluster doing, though? Was it just handling SMTP (doesn't take much juice for that, unless you are doing a lot of filtering)? Was it just POP3 (takes very little juice for that)? Was it doing IMAP (takes a bit more for that)? Was it also running a web interface?
Zimbra as just an MTA (no AV/AS, no IMAP, no POP, no HTTP, just plain SMTP) doesn't require a lot of CPU or RAM. As you add services, though, you need more power, especially if you are using the AJAX webclient.
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My dedicated Zimbra NE server here at work supports 49 users, and it's got 4 GB RAM and a quad-core 64-bit CPU AND STILL runs quite slow at times... Amazing..
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And, how much of the Zimbra stack is sitting on that single box? If you have everything (SMTP, AV/AS, LDAP, web server, logger, IMAP, etc) running on there, then what do you expect?
The biggest thing with mail servers is disk I/O: if you can put fast disks in the box, or separate out the disk intensive bits onto separate boxes, then you can get away with less CPU/RAM.
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