Help sizing a cyrus server

[Vernon A. Fort]

Bianchi Quota Leonardo wrote:
> Hi, suppose I have to realize one Cyrus system for 10.000 peak
> concurrent connections.
>
> Is it possible to use virtual machine (VmWare)and SAN disks fiber
> connected? There should be any requisite for this solution?
>
> - How much phisycal memory do I need? And number and type of processors?
> - Can I guess a Memory consumption each connection?
> - Do You agree that I have no need to use Murder as the disk is on a
> SAN? And if the need I can install Murder later?
>
> Thanks a lot, for help!
>   
I run a 20k user mail server which was installed as a guest os with 
vmware.  I cannot speak on the SAN disk option but the VMWARE made the 
server very unstable.  It was something with the NTPL, Interrupts and 
Clock Ticks. We eventually re-installed the server with just the O/S - 
made the server 10 times faster.  I had no control over the VMWARE host 
itself so it could have been a badly configured host server, either way 
i would not recommend using vmware server.  Oddly, it was the only guest 
on the host server.

Current setup:
    gentoo, postfix, amavisd-new, clamav/f-prot, cyrus-imapd, squirrelmail
    Dual Xeon 3.0 (older xeons)
    4GB of memory
    280GB raid for mail data but we limit the accounts to 20meg.
    19,798 users accounts with around 210k of mail flow per day
    average around 4-5k users on during peak hours
    running very smoothly.

Vernon