4 months of experience

[haensse]

Dear forum,

I'm using zimbra now since the end of last year.
Zimbra 4.0.5 (debian) is installed on OpenVZ.
The load of the zimbra server is low (email for 4 people, maybe 30 emails per day)

There are a couple of things that really suck with zimbra:

1) It needs at least 2Gb of memory. My first computer (ZX81) had 1kb of memory!!!!
2) It regularly crashes and must be restarted (once per week)
3) Maybe once per month there is something locked, which requires me to fix something (e.g. virus database broken, zimbra/store inconsistency)
4) It is slow over the internet. Tried to read my emails from Seychelles (maybe 3kbyte/sec connection) and it needed 20 minutes to load all the data. What would a mail client be good for than reading mails from abroad?! All this fancy graphics are nice, but I would rather like to read my emails faster.
5) With the internet explorer zimbra needs very long to load. I know with firefox it is ok, but sometimes from abroad there is only a internet explorer installed.
6) Configuration is sometimes cumbersome, some features in the webinterface are broken and require the command line for configuration.

Anybody sharing this experience / any comments?

best regards

Dani

[gmsmith]

Okay, I'll bite...

Originally Posted by haensse

1) It needs at least 2Gb of memory. My first computer (ZX81) had 1kb of memory!!!!

This makes no sense....that is like complaining you can't run MS Office on my first TRS-80 with 4k of memory. The Sinclair was discontinued in 1983, welcome to 2007, where you can get a 1GB memory stick for $4.99 and systems need ram to perform properly.

Originally Posted by haensse

2) It regularly crashes and must be restarted (once per week)

I would look at your configurations. What config do you have in your virtual machine? What do you logs say, have you done any troubleshooting?

Originally Posted by haensse

3) Maybe once per month there is something locked, which requires me to fix something (e.g. virus database broken, zimbra/store inconsistency)

See answer to number 2

Originally Posted by haensse

4) It is slow over the internet. Tried to read my emails from Seychelles (maybe 3kbyte/sec connection) and it needed 20 minutes to load all the data. What would a mail client be good for than reading mails from abroad?! All this fancy graphics are nice, but I would rather like to read my emails faster.

Version 4.5 introduced the basic client, specifically for your situation. Check it out.

Originally Posted by haensse

5) With the internet explorer zimbra needs very long to load. I know with firefox it is ok, but sometimes from abroad there is only a internet explorer installed.

Again, make sure you are using IE6SP2. There is some dependency on client hardware and local Internet connectivity.

Originally Posted by haensse

6) Configuration is sometimes cumbersome, some features in the webinterface are broken and require the command line for configuration.

If you run into a problem, be sure to check bugzilla and vote for appropriate bugs. No use complaining if you aren't contributing to the community.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by gmsmith

Okay, I'll bite...

Me too....but you've already said it all.

[RaNd]

Originally Posted by haensse

Dear forum,

5) With the internet explorer zimbra needs very long to load. I know with firefox it is ok, but sometimes from abroad there is only a internet explorer installed.
Dani

U can try Portable Firefox http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable on a USB Stick . . . or Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition http://portableapps.com/apps/interne...rbird_portable

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by haensse

4) It is slow over the internet. Tried to read my emails from Seychelles (maybe 3kbyte/sec connection) and it needed 20 minutes to load all the data. What would a mail client be good for than reading mails from abroad?! All this fancy graphics are nice, but I would rather like to read my emails faster.

Actually, I'd suggest that's more to do with your connection or the upload speed of your server rather than Zimbra. There have, in any case, been significant performance improvements in the speed of the web client in current versions. As has already suggested you can try the 'lite' client.

[haensse]

I'm glad to hear that there is a basic client. Your excuses for the high resource requirements are just lame. Even on a high end server resources are limited. The more I can put in the box the better...even in 2007
And, can you please send me a couple of DDR2 modules for that price .

If you're sure that it running stable in a productive environment at your site. So please, is there somebody interested in checking my OpenVZ configuration, please let me know. /proc/user_beancounters has 0 failcnt.

Today the server is down again with some
Caused by: java.io.IOException: Could not create index /opt/zimbra/index/0/6/index/0 (directory already exists)
which is a very favorite one, after removing that directory manually, it is working for some time (did this yesterday, today trouble with it again)

I can open a new thread with my configuration.

[chh]

Hi,

I would like to add my thoughts and experience to these points:

Originally Posted by haensse

1) It needs at least 2Gb of memory. My first computer (ZX81) had 1kb of memory!!!!
2) It regularly crashes and must be restarted (once per week)
4) It is slow over the internet. Tried to read my emails from Seychelles (maybe 3kbyte/sec connection) and it needed 20 minutes to load all the data.

We are running our server with 2GB and 15 users with quite a big load of mails. The memory is mostly used but we still have X running most of the time, although unneded, don't flame me for that please, and the server never needed to swap.
I did not have a single crash since installing Zimbra the middle of last year, only the logger stopped sometimes.
The connection you described is extremely slow. With such a speed anything beyond pure text is simply unrealistic. Try IMAP for those cases.

Just my 2c

Christian

[JoshuaPrismon]

Originally Posted by haensse

Dear forum,

I'm using zimbra now since the end of last year.
Zimbra 4.0.5 (debian) is installed on OpenVZ.
The load of the zimbra server is low (email for 4 people, maybe 30 emails per day)

There are a couple of things that really suck with zimbra:

1) It needs at least 2Gb of memory. My first computer (ZX81) had 1kb of memory!!!!
2) It regularly crashes and must be restarted (once per week)
3) Maybe once per month there is something locked, which requires me to fix something (e.g. virus database broken, zimbra/store inconsistency)
4) It is slow over the internet. Tried to read my emails from Seychelles (maybe 3kbyte/sec connection) and it needed 20 minutes to load all the data. What would a mail client be good for than reading mails from abroad?! All this fancy graphics are nice, but I would rather like to read my emails faster.
5) With the internet explorer zimbra needs very long to load. I know with firefox it is ok, but sometimes from abroad there is only a internet explorer installed.
6) Configuration is sometimes cumbersome, some features in the webinterface are broken and require the command line for configuration.

Anybody sharing this experience / any comments?

best regards

Dani

You are doing something really wrong, or there is a problem with OpenVZ. I run a box about five times as busy as yours on a Fedora Xen instance, and I have no problems at all with it.

Do you have anything else running on the box? What operating system are you using? What kind of swap are you using, and is it thrashing the disk? Your network speed definitely sounds to low. Which kernel/distro are you running?

What have you tried to configure that you could not configure via the web interface?

[Dirk]

*cough* troll *cough*

ahem

haensse are you a Network Edition customer? If not, buy MS Exchange and be done, if you are then contact support and look for a supported answer.

All of your points are without foundation and have been proven to be erronuous in many posts on this forum.

Zimbra works well when configured well. The responsibility rests with the sysadmin. End of story.

[jholder]

Now that everyone has had a chance to voice their opinions, let's move on.

Thread Closed.
-jh