Zimbra needs 10 minutes to start, is it normal?

[X-Dimension]

I've installed Zimbra 6 Beta 2 on CentOS5.3 (64Bit) and also Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS (64Bit). On both linux distributions zimbra needs more than 10 minutes to start on an Athlon X2 5050e based test system with 4 Gigabyte RAM. CentOs and Ubuntu are running in a VirtualMachine (using VirtualBox 2.2.4)
Is this a normal startup time or Zimbra?

Also some Java processes produces high cpu usage (80-100%) on theses servers, even if you don't work with Zimbra. Is this a problem with Virtualbox, or a normal behavior?

[xeon]

Whats your hard drive setup? Any RAID or? I had Zimbra on a RAID1 with 5 other hosts and Zimbra took less then a minute to start on a quad core xeon. Only had 1.5GB of Ram on the Zimbra guest.

[X-Dimension]

The test-system has only a single 320GB Western Digital SATA drive and the host OS is running with Mandriva Linux (64Bit).

[phoenix]

The test-system has only a single 320GB Western Digital SATA drive and the host OS is running with Mandriva Linux (64Bit).

Ten minutes seems a bit on the high side but...... How much RAM is allocated to the VM? Virtualbox isn't a supported platform and I don't know much about running Zimbra in this environment. The same rules would apply for a VM as a real server, plenty of RAM and possibly a RAID 10 but for low usage testing a second HD might be more appropriate. How many users on this system? Any other VMs on this machine when Zimbra starts? Any other wok being done at the same time as Zimbra? Are your DNS A & MX records correct for the ZImbra server?

[X-Dimension]

The VM has 1GB of RAM and is a fresh installation with only the default users (admin, spam etc) There is also no other VM running.

I will test Zimbra with KVM and look how it compares to Virtualbox. Maybe its a VirtualBox Problem.

[phoenix]

The RAM is rather low, I'd recommend at leats 1.5GB and KVM or Virtualbox aren't really suitable platforms for for Zimbra. If you really want to virtualise then you should install a bare metal hypervisor such as ESX(i) or XENServer.

[mozg31337]

Same here!

I was running zimbra on a relatively powerfull hardware through VirtualBoxing. I've tried VirtualBox 2.2.0, 2.2.2 and 2.2.4 with the same results.

My native hardware is 64bit Gentoo linux running on 2xDualXeon 3.0Ghz, 4GB ram, RAID5 with 5HDs (hdparm shows over 200mb/s read speed). I've given 2Gb of ram to the VirtualBox machine running Ubuntu 8.10 amd64. Zimbra default install with 1 user is so slow that it becomes difficult to work with plain ssh console. I've run the simple stop/start tests on this setup. Zimbra Stop - 1m 40sec ; Zimbra start 7m 20 sec. Something is seriously messed up here!

Andrei

[phoenix]

I'm afraid it's the same answer as above, Virtual box is not supported and not a suitable platform for ZImbra. If you want that run a bare metal hypervisor. You also should not run Zimbra on RAID5, use RAID10.

[X-Dimension]

I've installed Zimbra now on a computer (not a virtual machine).
This test-system has 1 GB of RAM (i haven't more here to play with), a Dual Core Athlon X2 and a single SATA drive.
On this machine the Zimbra service starts a lot faster, but still needs over 6 minutes! Why is zimbra such a "monster"?
I had installed Scalix also today on the same machines and it only needs some seconds to start in the VirtualBox under CentOS.
But i still don't like Scalix because the AJAX based web client of Zimbra is much better and feels a little bit faster.

Is there a chance to see some performance optimisations on Zimbra in the future?

[raj]

just for the sake of argument if it load in 6-10 min and then it "works" as intended and flawlessly, what is the problem or issue.
from my exp its the amavis processes which get forked and modules loaded which takes time..many times..clamav is stuck..
there are LOTS Of thigs which gets started in an order just not 1 services.
loading time is not the mesure of software's performence, reliability and workings.

for troubleshooting do the following:

su - zimbra
zmcontrol stop
logout
cat /dev/null > /var/log/maillog
cat /dev/null > /var/log/messages
cat /dev/null > /var/log/zimbra.log
cat /dev/null > /opt/zimbra/log/mailbox.log
cat /dev/null > /opt/zimbra/log/zmmtaconfig.log
reboot -n

once loaded and back, look in /var/log/zimbra.log and see lines when zimbra started till it finished. there is a time stamp in every line, you can 100% pin point what steps are taking longer and then there are ways to figure out how to load it faster (i.e: ram, cpu or HD speed)

Raj