Cyrus in ISP environment?

[Lenny]

We use Cyrus for over 90% of our email handling at the ISP I work for. 
Granted,
we're nowhere near 500k users.

We currently have about 35000-40000 individual accounts, mostly quota'd at
25megs per mailbox. We have 3 frontend servers (currently running 
Fedora Core 2
and Cyrus 2.2.8) which run on Dell PowerEdge 1750's. 1 frontend is for 
pop/imap
connections primarily as well as spill over for incoming smtp. The other 2
frontends handle primarily incoming smtp, but one load balances pop/imap
connections with the first server (dns round robin is used for that). 
There are
3 backend servers which are Dell PowerEdge 2650's with the actual accounts on
them. We're actually only using 2 of the backends at the moment, the third is
unneeded. Then there's another Dell running the Mupdate master, another for an
LDAP server (we authenticate out of ldap for all users). This is setup to
handle virtual domains and serves a couple dozen (domains that is). The disks
on the backend servers are hardware RAID 5. We run webmail (Horde/Imp) on a
Cpanel server that we do hosting on although that could go just about 
anywhere.
All filesystems are currently ext3 although this may change in the future.

 From what I've been able to see, it should scale pretty well. I think with the
right equipment you could handle 500k, but that's just an opinion of mine,
would definately need some testing I should think.

All in all it's been a very robust system, although I'm currently having some
trouble getting things going on Fedora Core 3.

Anyways, this has just been my personal experience, but if you have any
questions feel free...

Lenny
-- 

"Wisdom is to a man an infinite Treasure" - Anonymous"


Quoting Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh at debian.org>:

> On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>> > have anyone successfully used Cyrus in ISP/webhosting environment?
>> > This means many different domains with little number of mailboxes per
>> > domain.
>> > Number of mailboxes: 500K - 1M
>> > Disk space used: 1TB and more
>> > Number of messages (daily number): 2-3M and more
>> > Is it recommended to use Cyrus in such environment?
>>
>> FastMail does.
>> http://www.fastmail.fm
>
> Indeed. But to do what they do, they have used just about every trick on the
> book and then some to squezze extra performance out of the system.  So, do
> NOT expect to duplicate what the FastMail people did doing anything less
> than:
>
> 1. Using the appropriate hardware and filesystems.
> 2. Using Cyrus 2.3.
> 3. Using the best possible configuration for the above.
>
> But it is doable, yes.  It just ain't cheap or easy.  4M messages/day means
> almost 50 messages per second.  You will probably need a murder cluster or a
> two-layer perdition cluser and two-layer MTA setup to get this.  And a pool
> of content filter workers, and webmail servers too.
>
> Have I ever said I admire the FastMail.fm folks a lot? No? Well, here it is
> :-)
>
> --
>   "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
>   them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
>   where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
>   Henrique Holschuh
> ---
> Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus
> Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu
> List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
>



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