hardware for cyrus murder

[Etienne Goyer]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 11:02:09AM +0100, Thomas Hager wrote:
> on another site i'm running a cyrus murder with 2 frontends and 2
> backends handling about 30k users. we have ldap daemons on the backend
> used for user authentication/mail routing and mtas on the frontends
> handling smtp.
> this system handles an average of 8 pop3/imap4 logins per second and
> 4000 lmtp deliveries per hour. 
> but it reaches its limits in very busy hours. usually the cyrus internal
> authentication begins to fail. backends and mupdate slaves can no longer
> authenticate to the mupdate master and frontend services fail to
> authenticate to the locally running mupdate slaves.
> 
> we are scaling now by moving the mtas to dedicated servers and by
> removing the mail routing load from the backend ldap daemons.

Very interesting ... I am building a Murder whee we expect a similar
load.  Could you expand a bit on the hardware used ?  Are these machine
mostly IO, memory or CPU bound ?  Do you have a dedicated MUPDATE
master, or the master run on a frontend ?  What exactly is failing in
the authentication process ?  Are you authenticating users via
saslauthd ?  Have you traced the reason why authentication to the
mupdate master fail ?

Your experiences could be very valuable to me; I would be very glad if
you could share some of them.

Thanks !

-- 
Etienne Goyer                    Linux Québec Technologies Inc.
http://www.LinuxQuebec.com       etienne.goyer at linuxquebec.com