What hardware to handle this

[Andrew Morgan]

On Mon, 22 Nov 2004, Jim Bartus wrote:

> I'm looking to redo our companys mailserver setup, and I want to move from 
> our current system of POP3 to an IMAP based system.  I've done a fair amount 
> of reading and Cyrus looks like the right answer, so I was hoping you guys 
> could help me out with some final details.
>
> I have approx 500 users.  Of which probably only about 300 will be connected 
> at peak times, but they will be consantly connected in the "check for new 
> mail every 5 minutes" sense.  Overall the system will deliver about 25 - 
> 40,000 messages a day.  There will be a seperate SMTP server delivering to 
> this via LMTP, and a seperate webmail server connecting in through IMAP. 
> Quota's will be set around 250MB and the use of sieve filters will be 
> enabled.  All with authenticate against our LDAP server (its not purchased 
> yet, but it'll be novell edirectory).
>
> My major question is what kind of hardware will cyrus require to handle that 
> level of load?  Currently we were planning on buying a dual 3.0GHz Xeon 
> system with 2GB of ram running RHEL 3.0.  For storage it'll connect via HBA 
> to our EMC CX500 storage array.  Will that do it?  Does anyone have anything 
> similar setup?

Our setup is very similar to yours.  We have campus mail relays that 
handle all the MTA duties and deliver using LMTP to our Cyrus server.  The 
Cyrus servers is a Dell 2650 with two 2.8GHz cpus and 2GB of RAM.  It is 
attached to an external Dell 220S SCSI storage array, configured as RAID 
0+1 (RAID 10).  Webmail (Horde/IMP) runs on separate boxes.

We have about 25,000 active users/mailboxes and about 500 peak IMAP 
connections during the daytime.  Another poster mentioned bumping it up to 
4GB, but I'm not sure that is necessary.  Here is the memory/cpu usage 
right now (about peak time) on our Cyrus server:

Tasks: 545 total,   2 running, 543 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):   8.6% user,   2.7% system,   0.0% nice,  88.7% idle
Mem:   2068536k total,  2055052k used,    13484k free,    53252k buffers
Swap:  2000084k total,    18492k used,  1981592k free,   970056k cached

The system uptime is just over 100 days, so I'd say that it rarely uses 
swap.

 	Andy
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