On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 17:01 -0700, Kevin Fries wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote: > > | 700 users is nothing. You will not see any problems with > | scalability with that user base. Multiply it by 100, and you'll > | start seening first problems. Go past 100,000, and things get > | preaty tight. > | > | Before my wife talked me into moving to Canada (and out of all the > | warm places in Canada, Winnipeg was our destination), I've used to > | work for large national ISP where user's were stored in actual > | /etc/passwd. Mail server worked well until user base got to about > | 50,000 users on 4-CPU Alpha Server running Tru64 Unix (and later > | cluster of several Alpha Servers). Then, Internet boom hapened, and > | user base exploded. Things started to slow down drastically with > | each new user. Local system accounts proved not to be very scalable > | solution. In those days, there were no out-of-box solutions based > | on LDAP, like there are today. So what we did back than, we moved > | all users from shell accounts into Oracle database, and made patches > | for sendmail, procmail, and qpopper to work with users that exist > | only as records inside Oracle SQL database. That same 4-CPU Alpha > | Server that was beginning to be painfully slow, all the sudden was > | capable of hosting several milion mailboxes. Now, that is what I > | have in mind when I say scalability. > | > | If we were to do it again today, we'd probably simply use LDAP and > | Cyrus, with little development time spent for transition. > | > You are trying to do 70,000 account on one server? Are you f-ing nuts!!!! > > That is what clusters are for! Then, the standard directory structure > of Dovecot becomes an even better idea. > > This conversation has just gotten stupid, one server for 70,000 > account, you just are not dealing with a normal situation. The > majority of companies (greater than 70%) are less than 100 people > large. The majority of corporations will never get that large because > they will use a server in front to direct the mail to the remote > offices local mail server where 5k-10k is considered huge. To follow > your logic we should all have NASA space shuttles because a small > percentage of us go into space. > > This is just silly. I would put Dovecot up even at a large > university. You are talking about AOL type numbers which is just > craziness. > > I think I will start contributing to more sane conversations from here > on out! > > 100,000+ as normal, and on one server! lmao ---- 1 - he actually said they had an Alpha cluster for that job 2 - his point was about primarily scalability 3 - I have never used either Dovecot or Cyrus and don't have a dog in this hunt. But I can never ignore the amount of resources an imap server expends servicing clients and efficiency can be key - whether it is 50 - 100 or 100,000 clients. It is almost certain that the clients that I work with (10-30 employees) - this server is doing more than just imapd. 4 - Cyrus genetics are good in that it is used by large mail systems. 5 - Cyrus support quota's separately from OS 6 - Webmin LDAP Users and Groups is integrated with Cyrus Dovecot may be great but Cyrus-imapd has a bunch going for it. Craig
