Hardware

Ozgur Ozdemircili

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May 4, 2011, 10:44:18 AM5/4/11

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Hi,

A quick question for the wexperienced ones over here. Can you please share your hardware configs and users/ domains you have on them?

I am building a qmail server for 20000 accounts and the machine is:

AMD Bi Opteron 612816x 2.00+ GHz 2x12 MB L3 - QPI 2x6.4 GT/sec

32 GB DDR3

2x 1500 GB - SATA2

How many users / domain can I host in the machine with efficency?

Thank you in advance.

Kulkarni Shantanu

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May 4, 2011, 11:12:03 AM5/4/11

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* Ozgur Ozdemircili <ozgur.oz...@gmail.com> [110504 20:30]:

qmail takes up very less resources. If you have av scanners or spam
handlers; they will take more resources.
On one particular machine Intel Xeon 1.86GHz, with 2Gb RAM we are
handling around 5000 live (working )email addresses. The same machine
does av scanning and also has webmail (so apache too). The machine has
uptime of 354 days (up since we got it) with load average 0.18 and
maximum load so far 18.2.

Shantanu
www.shantanukulkarni.org
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Shepherd Nhongo

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May 4, 2011, 12:23:56 PM5/4/11

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On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 5:12 PM, Kulkarni Shantanu <djb...@shantanukulkarni.org> wrote:

* Ozgur Ozdemircili <ozgur.oz...@gmail.com> [110504 20:30]:

> Hi,
>
> A quick question for the wexperienced ones over here. Can you please share
> your hardware configs and users/ domains you have on them?
>
> I am building a qmail server for 20000 accounts and the machine is:
>
> AMD Bi Opteron 612816x 2.00+ GHz 2x12 MB L3 - QPI 2x6.4 GT/sec
> 32 GB DDR3
> 2x 1500 GB - SATA2
>
> How many users / domain can I host in the machine with efficency?

qmail-ldap patch should be the best option to run 20000 user mail boxes.

As for hardware 32GB ram is an overkill :-) 3TB HDD is still fine but how will you backup your mail server?

Ever heard of virtualisation? I have four blade servers in different parts of the world running Virtual Machines that have qmail mta. I have written a small backup script that relies on cron and run every 11hours of the day.It's working well for me but then my capacity is not anywhere closer to 20000 i have just checked and the total is 12034 mailboxes with about 200GB of files.Most of my users are using imap and some bleed all the emails using their mail delivery agents.

qmail takes up very less resources. If you have av scanners or spam
handlers; they will take more resources.
On one particular machine Intel Xeon 1.86GHz, with 2Gb RAM we are
handling around 5000 live (working )email addresses. The same machine
does av scanning and also has webmail (so apache too). The machine has
uptime of 354 days (up since we got it) with load average 0.18 and
maximum load so far 18.2.

Shantanu
www.shantanukulkarni.org
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Scott Helms

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May 4, 2011, 12:58:56 PM5/4/11

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Disk IO is much more important for raw email processing than processor speed or RAM. Count of mailboxes isn't a great way to determine how busy the system will be since 20k boxes that are lightly used will create less load than 50 very active mail boxes that have >100 GB of storage. How will your users access their email, POP3, IMAP4, web mail? Are you going to relay out bound email for these users as well? How about SSL/TLS secured SMTP, POP, IMAP, and HTTP? Any consideration for AV and anti-spam and if so will those be run on the same server? How important is redundancy?

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