[Dovecot] unofficial Survey about your Dovecot server :) to compare with my own server setup...
Hi Borthers/Sisters
Thanks for all the developer(s) and for all the hard work spent on build this great piece of software! I loved Dovecot since it is really easy to set up and really fast but I am really new to it (only 2 weeks and half). Right now, our server configuration is:
Server: Apple Xserve G5 dual RAM: 4GB Number of Users: ~ 150 IMAP only users Authentication: LDAP Mailboxes sizes: ~200GB Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 5 (I am looking forward to beta 7 that was released today) Email client software: mostly Thunderbird 1.5
Right now, we are experiencing occasional problem with imap users unable to connect to the server. With beta 3, we had to restart the dovecot/imap processes almost every 3 hours. with Dovecot beta5 we still have to restart the processes but it seems to occur every 3 days (Friday and Yesterday) and only in a peak time (around 3pm). I am waiting to occur it again and I will be able to grab more information about the number of processes, users, virtual memory, etc, etc. So, at this point, I don't have much information to debug the problem. Let's wait.
I guess we have here a nice machine (xserve) and not a huge number of users (~150). So, I would expect that our server would handle the load. But having to restart Dovecot once a while, as I described, is not an option (users are getting frustrated). :( Maybe with Beta 7 with the feature "Added shutdown_clients setting to control if existing imap/pop3 processes should be killed when master is" can stop our nightmares :)
By the way, our dovecot.conf is basically the default sent with the software. We haven't changed much there!
Meanwhile, I'd like to know, if possible, whar are you using to run Dovecot like hardware, OS version, number of users and problems that you are experiencing. I'd like to compare with my setup and if it is the case, migrate to pure Linux or FreeBSD if it is more stable than OS/X!
Best Regards,
Flavio Domingos
- San Francisco/CA -
Flavio Domingos wrote:
Hi Borthers/Sisters
Server: Apple Xserve G5 dual RAM: 4GB Number of Users: ~ 150 IMAP only users Authentication: LDAP Mailboxes sizes: ~200GB Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 5 (I am looking forward to beta 7 that was released today) Email client software: mostly Thunderbird 1.5
Meanwhile, I'd like to know, if possible, whar are you using to run Dovecot like hardware, OS version, number of users and problems that you are experiencing. I'd like to compare with my setup and if it is the case, migrate to pure Linux or FreeBSD if it is more stable than OS/X!
I like the idea of a roundup survey of what situations people are using Dovecot in. It can be cited for new people to improve their confidence, and also let Timo know how great a job he's doing :)
We're quite a small install, and quite an old version, but it chugs along nicely.
Server: Sun Netra X1 ( UltraSPARC IIi 550MHz ) RAM: 1GB Users: ~ 25 IMAP, 3 or 4 POP3 Auth: passwd/shadow Maildir size: ~16GB Dovecot version: 0.99.14 (will move to 1.0 when I get time :) Client Software: Thunderbird
I put in about 0 work in keeping it running... it just hums along without issue.
-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net
My hardware:
AMD Semptron 2600+ with 1 gig of ram. 2 300 gb SATA drives with RAID 1 partition About 500 IMAP users and some POP Also running Exim, Squirrelmail, Bind, and VoIP server Asterisk 20 gigs of mailboxes Hosting about 200 domains Authentication - multiple passwd/shadow files - one per domain Spam filtering on a separate server Clients vary, Outlook, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Netscape, Squirrelmail, Eudora
Works great, very low load levels. Very fast.
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Curtis Maloney wrote:
Flavio Domingos wrote:
Hi Borthers/Sisters
Server: Apple Xserve G5 dual RAM: 4GB Number of Users: ~ 150 IMAP only users Authentication: LDAP Mailboxes sizes: ~200GB Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 5 (I am looking forward to beta 7 that was released today) Email client software: mostly Thunderbird 1.5
Meanwhile, I'd like to know, if possible, whar are you using to run Dovecot like hardware, OS version, number of users and problems that you are experiencing. I'd like to compare with my setup and if it is the case, migrate to pure Linux or FreeBSD if it is more stable than OS/X!
I like the idea of a roundup survey of what situations people are using Dovecot in. It can be cited for new people to improve their confidence, and also let Timo know how great a job he's doing :)
We're quite a small install, and quite an old version, but it chugs along nicely.
Server: Sun Netra X1 ( UltraSPARC IIi 550MHz ) RAM: 1GB Users: ~ 25 IMAP, 3 or 4 POP3 Auth: passwd/shadow Maildir size: ~16GB Dovecot version: 0.99.14 (will move to 1.0 when I get time :) Client Software: Thunderbird
I put in about 0 work in keeping it running... it just hums along without issue.
My setup at work is similar:
Server: Dell PowerEdge 1550 dual 1Ghz PIII RAM: 4GB Users: ~200 mix of IMAP and POP3 Auth: passwd/shadow Maildir size: ~2GB (I have fairly low filesystem quotas setup) Dovecot version: 0.99.14 (waiting for the opportunity to test out 1.0 before migrating) Client Software: Thunderbird, Becky!, Squirrelmail, possibly others
I'm also running sendmail/mimdefang/spamassassin/clamav on this machine.
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Server: IBM eServer xSeries 226 (dual P4) RAM: 2GB Number of Users: >9000, most of them use POP3 Authentication: MySQL Mailboxes sizes: ~40GB (partialy compressed) Dovecot version: patched 1.0-test80 (upgrade to beta 7 in progress) Email client software: various
Server: dual p4 Xeon 3GHz (x3) RAM: 3Gb (each) Number of Users: ~350,000 (total) Authentication: Berkeley db3 via PAM Mailboxes sizes: 600Gb (total) Dovecot version: 1.0beta3/beta4 Email client software: various
what's the largest production installation of Dovecot? :)
grant.
grant beattie wrote:
Server: dual p4 Xeon 3GHz (x3) RAM: 3Gb (each) Number of Users: ~350,000 (total) Authentication: Berkeley db3 via PAM Mailboxes sizes: 600Gb (total) Dovecot version: 1.0beta3/beta4 Email client software: various
what's the largest production installation of Dovecot? :)
Well looks like Cor Bosman is winning at the moment!
Servers: 20 dual 3.x ghz FreeBSD 4.10 RAM: 4GB each Number of Users: 40.000+ daily users, 150.000 regular users, 500.000+ uses it once in a while Authentication: pam/radius Mailboxes sizes: customers get a 500MB mail quota, we use multi terrabyte netapp fileservers. Dovecot version: 1.0 beta4 I think, we cant keep up :) Email client software: anything you can imagine, and then some things you cant imagine.
Could you guys discuss the differences in your setup? Obviously the question here is why does Cor use 20 servers for 500,000 users when Grant needs 3 servers (same cpu, LESS ram) for 350,000 users?
One thing I noticed is that Grant has an average of 1.7MB usage per user indicating a lot of inactive users amoung the 350,000. 50,000 active? Cor has around 200,000 active/regular users.
In anycase - both of you beat the hell out of my UW IMAP server: Dual 3.0 GHz Xeon 4GB Ram SCSI 10,000rpm RAID 5 ( 3 x 144GB) 3000 active users, 5000 squirrelmail webmail sessions per day Quotas ranging from 50MB to 1000MB. About 100GB of mail stored total. Load up to 10 sometimes! Reading in those big MBOX files is hard work.
This is why I'm investigating moving to Dovecot =)
Can I suggest we create a wiki page for these? It would be GREAT to have an archive of registered working production setups. This way Dovecot admins can browse for a similar system and perhaps contact someone who has a similar setup and can help them.
I've created a page at: http://wiki.dovecot.org/DovecotServerInstallations
Accessible from the Odds and Ends section of the front page.
I've put up a sample server config (actually borrowed from Dennis but with all personal details removed for privacy!). If you guys fancy copying your individual server details to that page we could build up a really nice list of working installations.
Best wishes, Daniel
Servers: 20 dual 3.x ghz FreeBSD 4.10 RAM: 4GB each Number of Users: 40.000+ daily users, 150.000 regular users, 500.000+ uses it once in a while Authentication: pam/radius Mailboxes sizes: customers get a 500MB mail quota, we use multi terrabyte netapp fileservers. Dovecot version: 1.0 beta4 I think, we cant keep up :) Email client software: anything you can imagine, and then some things you cant imagine.
Could you guys discuss the differences in your setup? Obviously the question here is why does Cor use 20 servers for 500,000 users when Grant needs 3 servers (same cpu, LESS ram) for 350,000 users?
We use 10 per service. So 10 for webmail's imap backend, and 10 for plain imap. We like to seperate these functionalities. We could probably handle it with 3, but we dont want to try that out :) We prefer to have a lot of overcapacity to handle sudden peaks.
Cor
Daniel Watts wrote:
Could you guys discuss the differences in your setup? Obviously the question here is why does Cor use 20 servers for 500,000 users when Grant needs 3 servers (same cpu, LESS ram) for 350,000 users?
One thing I noticed is that Grant has an average of 1.7MB usage per user indicating a lot of inactive users amoung the 350,000. 50,000 active? Cor has around 200,000 active/regular users.
In anycase - both of you beat the hell out of my UW IMAP server: Dual 3.0 GHz Xeon 4GB Ram SCSI 10,000rpm RAID 5 ( 3 x 144GB) 3000 active users, 5000 squirrelmail webmail sessions per day Quotas ranging from 50MB to 1000MB. About 100GB of mail stored total. Load up to 10 sometimes! Reading in those big MBOX files is hard work.
This is why I'm investigating moving to Dovecot =)
Can I suggest we create a wiki page for these? It would be GREAT to have an archive of registered working production setups. This way Dovecot admins can browse for a similar system and perhaps contact someone who has a similar setup and can help them.
I've created a page at: http://wiki.dovecot.org/DovecotServerInstallations
Accessible from the Odds and Ends section of the front page.
I've put up a sample server config (actually borrowed from Dennis but with all personal details removed for privacy!). If you guys fancy copying your individual server details to that page we could build up a really nice list of working installations.
Best wishes, Daniel
For what it's worth when I switched from UW-IMAP to Dovecot it was like I died and went to heaven. It was as big of a relief as going from Sendmail to Exim.
Mine's in the wiki FWIW. THough it's a pretty minimalist installation.
-- "True Budo is done for the sake of building peace. Train every day so as to make peace between this spirit and all things manifested on the face of the Earth" - Ueshiba Morihei
... Server: NetBSD/i386 2.1, AMD K6-2 450MHz RAM: 256MiB Number of Users: ~20 Authentication: passwd Mailboxes sizes: 2.5GiB (total, all users, maildir format) Dovecot version: 1.0-nightly (updated ~biweekly; currently 20060328) Email client software: pine, mutt, Thunderbird, Outlook, OE
Also running on the box: Insanely complex custom sendmail milter in perl, spamassassin & spamass-milter, clamav, plus non-mail stuff
Yeah, so I only have a dozen-plus users, so I can get away with a not-so-powerful box. Even so, my e-mail addresses have been around long enough that well more than 90% of inbound mail attempts are spam rejected by one or more of the filters before delivery, making for a rather hot-running sendmail process tree.... ;)
-- -- Todd Vierling tv@duh.org tv@pobox.com todd@vierling.name
Server: FreeBSD/i386 4.11ish, AMD Athlon 1100 RAM: 256MB Number of Users: ~20, among 10 virtual domains Authentication: passwd Mailboxes sizes: 2.5GB (total, all users, maildir format) Dovecot version: 0.99.14 (haven't been ready for the downtime to upgrade) SMTP server software: Postfix 2.1.x Email client software: mutt, Thunderbird, Squirrelmail Bandwidth: 1Mbps SDSL
This system also hosts dns, web, and ftp for the aforementioned domains.
Jim Trigg
We use dovecot for 2 specific goals. First as a webmail backend, we have 10 servers for that. We have a second group of servers for normal imap access.
Servers: 20 dual 3.x ghz FreeBSD 4.10 RAM: 4GB each Number of Users: 40.000+ daily users, 150.000 regular users, 500.000+ uses it once in a while Authentication: pam/radius Mailboxes sizes: customers get a 500MB mail quota, we use multi terrabyte netapp fileservers. Dovecot version: 1.0 beta4 I think, we cant keep up :) Email client software: anything you can imagine, and then some things you cant imagine.
We arent having a lot of problems. If we did, we'd be flooded with helpdesk calls. Our main problem right now is that we use 2 namespaces (one is historical) and one of those 2 uses mbox. Combined with filesystem quotas that are necessary for us this produces some problems when the quota is reached. Basically dovecot stops working at that point.
We're in the process of dropping support for that mbox namespace but with so many customers thats not easy. So until that time we have to help customers fix their quota on that FS if they fill it up.
There also seems to be the occasional index corruption causing faulty information to come from dovecot. For that reason we dont use indexes on our webmail cluster unfortunately (well, we use memory indexes). The IMAP service isnt fully in production yet so we can play around more there, and occasionally customers still experience what are results of index failures. Maybe beta7 will fix it :)
Cor
Cor Bosman wrote:
Combined with filesystem quotas that are necessary for us this produces some problems when the quota is reached. Basically dovecot stops working at that point.
Surely you have indexeses placed at somewhere else than in users home directory which is quota restricted?
Placing indexes on their own LUN instead having them in mail spool gives you also a nice performance boost.
Tomi
Combined with filesystem quotas that are necessary for us this produces some problems when the quota is reached. Basically dovecot stops working at that point.
Surely you have indexeses placed at somewhere else than in users home directory which is quota restricted?
Placing indexes on their own LUN instead having them in mail spool gives you also a nice performance boost.
Like I said, we're not using indexes at the moment, not on our webmail service at least. With beta4 (or maybe 3) we were still seeing problems which cause bad information inside webmail. So indexes are not involved. This may have been fixed in later betas, we'll give it a go again soon.
When we do use indexes we use a seperate filesystem.
Cor
Cor Bosman wrote:
When we do use indexes we use a seperate filesystem.
Cor
Yeah - me too. I'm using a raid 1 partition for the mail boxes and for the indexes I use a separate unmirrored partition. And I don't do backups on the index space.
Thanx for this nice software!
Server: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+ RAM: 1 GB Number of Users: ~10 OS: Debian Linux 2.6.14.2 Authentication: passwd Mailboxes sizes: 2GB Dovecot version: 1.0beta1 Email client software: various
--
Leitung Technik it@dooti.de
Honoldweg 9 70193 Stuttgart
Mobil: 0151 1 411 65 03 E-Mail: timo.hallek@dooti.de Web: www.dooti.de
On Wed, 12 Apr 2006, Flavio Domingos wrote:
Hi Borthers/Sisters
Thanks for all the developer(s) and for all the hard work spent on build this great piece of software! I loved Dovecot since it is really easy to set up and really fast but I am really new to it (only 2 weeks and half). Right now, our server configuration is:
Server: Apple Xserve G5 dual RAM: 4GB Number of Users: ~ 150 IMAP only users Authentication: LDAP Mailboxes sizes: ~200GB Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 5 (I am looking forward to beta 7 that was released today) Email client software: mostly Thunderbird 1.5 <snip>
Server: Dell PowerEdge Dual Xeon 3.2GHz EMT64 running Fedora Core 5 RAM: 4GB Disk: SATA RAID 5 ~400GB Number of Users: ~1000 POP users (occasional imap/squirrelmail). Authentication: PAM Mailbox sizes: < 100MB each Dovecot version: 1.0.beta3 Email clients software: mostly Outlook Express, and various others.
This machine also runs sendmail/MailScanner/spamassassin/clamav/bitdefender, webmail/squirrelmail, radius, etc.
Server: Sun Fire 480, 4xUltraSparcIII 900Mhz Storage: Sun 1xT3 + 1xT4 arrays (Fibre Channel + RAID5) OS: Solaris 8 RAM: 8GB Number of Users: ~20,000 mostly IMAP Authentication: Active Directory via PAM and pam_ldap Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 3 Email client software: various, mostly Outlook/Outlook Express and Prayer Webmail Mailboxes sizes: ~375GB inboxes 800GB folders
Migrated from UW-IMAP in September with spectacular improvement in performance!
Chris
-- --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+- Christopher Wakelin, c.d.wakelin@reading.ac.uk IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094
Chris Wakelin wrote:
Server: Sun Fire 480, 4xUltraSparcIII 900Mhz Storage: Sun 1xT3 + 1xT4 arrays (Fibre Channel + RAID5) OS: Solaris 8 RAM: 8GB Number of Users: ~20,000 mostly IMAP Authentication: Active Directory via PAM and pam_ldap Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 3 Email client software: various, mostly Outlook/Outlook Express and Prayer Webmail Mailboxes sizes: ~375GB inboxes 800GB folders
Migrated from UW-IMAP in September with spectacular improvement in performance!
Chris
Hi Chris,
Just wondering - is it possible to install Dovecot on the same server as UW IMAP but listening on a different port? Will the installation of Dovecot mess up any of UW's files/libraries?
I'd like to try running them side by side first so that I can get Dovecot configured properly 'in-place' then switch off UW and have Dovecot listen on 143.
I'm just nervous about installing Dovecot on the server and corrupting UW somehow!
Daniel
Well, that's exactly what we did! One of the reasons for choosing Dovecot was that it was a drop-in replacement. There a couple of caveats though:
- Folder subscriptions
UW-IMAP stores these in a file called .mailboxlist as opposed to Dovecot's .subscriptions, and also includes the folder prefix for each subscribed folder.
I think most migrators have just copied .mailboxlist to .subscriptions, which is fine as long as you don't mind possible minor issues with adding/removing subscriptions afterwards (we hacked Dovecot a bit to keep the prefix, and to use .mailboxlist so it was easy to switch back and forth without losing subscriptions)
Try to avoid Dovecot and UW-IMAP opening the same folder at the same time (Dovecot would probably cope, but UW-IMAP would get upset)
mbx-format mailboxes need to be converted to mailbox
There's also some info in the Wiki, I think, about it.
I was a bit paranoid and set up a duplicate delivery mechanism (easy in Exim) to deliver messages to a separate folder that I tried not to open with Dovecot, just in case it corrupted something (I used a script using UW-IMAP mailutil to prune messages older than 7 days from it). Having said that, I didn't see any corruption problems.
Hope this helps, Chris
Daniel Watts wrote:
Chris Wakelin wrote:
Server: Sun Fire 480, 4xUltraSparcIII 900Mhz Storage: Sun 1xT3 + 1xT4 arrays (Fibre Channel + RAID5) OS: Solaris 8 RAM: 8GB Number of Users: ~20,000 mostly IMAP Authentication: Active Directory via PAM and pam_ldap Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 3 Email client software: various, mostly Outlook/Outlook Express and Prayer Webmail Mailboxes sizes: ~375GB inboxes 800GB folders
Migrated from UW-IMAP in September with spectacular improvement in performance!
Chris
Hi Chris,
Just wondering - is it possible to install Dovecot on the same server as UW IMAP but listening on a different port? Will the installation of Dovecot mess up any of UW's files/libraries?
I'd like to try running them side by side first so that I can get Dovecot configured properly 'in-place' then switch off UW and have Dovecot listen on 143.
I'm just nervous about installing Dovecot on the server and corrupting UW somehow!
Daniel
-- --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+- Christopher Wakelin, c.d.wakelin@reading.ac.uk IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094
On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 15:30 -0700, Flavio Domingos wrote:
Hi Borthers/Sisters
Thanks for all the developer(s) and for all the hard work spent on build this great piece of software! I loved Dovecot since it is really easy to set up and really fast but I am really new to it (only 2 weeks and half). Right now, our server configuration is:
Server: Apple Xserve G5 dual RAM: 4GB Number of Users: ~ 150 IMAP only users Authentication: LDAP Mailboxes sizes: ~200GB Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 5 (I am looking forward to beta 7 that was released today) Email client software: mostly Thunderbird 1.5
Hmm, from the number of users using dovecot (probably mostly without knowing it) Timo should be a rich man now :-)
However, I would also like to add our stats:
Server: AMD 1700+ OS: debian SID Storage: linux kernel RAID1 with 2 IDE-ATA133 drives RAM: 2GB Users: >3K IMAP & some POP3 Authentication: LDAP: Mailbox sizes: <500GB Dovecot: 1.0b5 client software: anything that calls itself client software :-)
regards
Udo Rader
-- bestsolution.at EDV Systemhaus GmbH http://www.bestsolution.at
Server: Sun Fire V440 (4x USIIIi @ 1 GHz) OS: Solaris 9 Storage: 3x Sun StorEdge T3, 250 GB each, FCAL RAM: 8 GB Users: ~3000 Authentication: PAM/passwd (using Sun's native LDAP) Mailbox sizes: ~200 GB Dovecot: 1.0-stable Clients: Thunderbird, Eudora, Pine, Squirrelmail
-Remy
Udo Rader wrote:
Hmm, from the number of users using dovecot (probably mostly without knowing it) Timo should be a rich man now :-)
Well, I doubt he'll ever want for a drink in any of our towns :)
-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net
Server: VMware ESX vm on a Dell Poweredge 2850, Dual Xeon 3.6GHz Storage: EMC fibre channel SAN RAM: 2GB OS: Debian Sarge Linux Number of Users: 30 000+, ~15 000 daily users Authentication: MySQL Mail spool usage: 40G+ Dovecot version: 1.0 alpha something .. going to beta7 soon. Email client software: Horde IMP, wide range of IMAP/POP3 clients
Great piece of software!!!!
Server: Sun Ultra-Enterprise E4500 8-Slot RAM: 6GB Number of Users: ~ 2000 IMAP only users Authentication: LDAP Mailboxes sizes: ~500GB Dovecot version: 1.0 alpha4 (thinking about upgrade to beta7, but still now alpha4 runs rock stable :) ) Email client software: OpenXchange Groupware, Evolution, mutt, kmail, Thunderbird
Representing the low-end.. ;)
Server: Self-assembled. Board/CPU: Via EPIA-5000 / 500Mhz RAM: 512MB Users: 1 OS: NetBSD 3.0 Auth: passwd Mbx-size: 500MB Dovecot: 1.0Beta5 Client-SW: Thunderbird 1.5 / mutt
When I'm moving mails, dovecot takes up to 10% of the CPU-time.
Flavio Domingos wrote:
Hi Borthers/Sisters
Thanks for all the developer(s) and for all the hard work spent on build this great piece of software! I loved Dovecot since it is really easy to set up and really fast but I am really new to it (only 2 weeks and half). Right now, our server configuration is:
Server: Apple Xserve G5 dual RAM: 4GB Number of Users: ~ 150 IMAP only users Authentication: LDAP Mailboxes sizes: ~200GB Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 5 (I am looking forward to beta 7 that was released today) Email client software: mostly Thunderbird 1.5
Right now, we are experiencing occasional problem with imap users unable to connect to the server. With beta 3, we had to restart the dovecot/imap processes almost every 3 hours. with Dovecot beta5 we still have to restart the processes but it seems to occur every 3 days (Friday and Yesterday) and only in a peak time (around 3pm). I am waiting to occur it again and I will be able to grab more information about the number of processes, users, virtual memory, etc, etc. So, at this point, I don't have much information to debug the problem. Let's wait.
I guess we have here a nice machine (xserve) and not a huge number of users (~150). So, I would expect that our server would handle the load. But having to restart Dovecot once a while, as I described, is not an option (users are getting frustrated). :( Maybe with Beta 7 with the feature "Added shutdown_clients setting to control if existing imap/pop3 processes should be killed when master is" can stop our nightmares :)
By the way, our dovecot.conf is basically the default sent with the software. We haven't changed much there!
Meanwhile, I'd like to know, if possible, whar are you using to run Dovecot like hardware, OS version, number of users and problems that you are experiencing. I'd like to compare with my setup and if it is the case, migrate to pure Linux or FreeBSD if it is more stable than OS/X!
Best Regards,
Flavio Domingos
- San Francisco/CA -
On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 15:38 +0200, Petar Bogdanovic wrote:
Representing the low-end.. ;)
Hah. I have you beat.
Server: P2/266 homebrew RAM: 320MB OS: CentOS 4.3 Number of Users: 1 IMAP Auth: LDAP via PAM Mailbox size: ~1.5GB mbox Version: 1.0beta5 (b7 whenever I feel like upgrading) Client: Evolution 2.6
-- Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams ivazquez@ivazquez.net http://fedora.ivazquez.net/
gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 38028b72
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 15:38 +0200, Petar Bogdanovic wrote:
Representing the low-end.. ;)
Hah. I have you beat.
No chance - your P2 is very likely faster than my Via EDEN.. 8^1
RAM: 320MB
However, I admit that your RAM beats mine. ;)
On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 16:02 +0200, Petar Bogdanovic wrote:
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 15:38 +0200, Petar Bogdanovic wrote:
Representing the low-end.. ;)
Hah. I have you beat.
No chance - your P2 is very likely faster than my Via EDEN.. 8^1
Is that it.. hmm too easy ;)
RAM: 320MB
However, I admit that your RAM beats mine. ;)
jeroen@purgatory:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | head -n 7 processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 5 model : 2 model name : Pentium 75 - 200 stepping : 5 cpu MHz : 99.727
jeroen@purgatory:~$ cat /proc/meminfo | head -n 1
MemTotal: 125860 kB
Thus: Server: DEC Intel Multia (Single Intel Pentium 100) RAM: 128MB (couldn't find more SIMM's :) OS: Debian unstable Number of Users: 7 IMAP of which 4 clients checking mail near 24/7 Auth: PAM Mailbox size: 2Gb Maildir / ~1000 new mails/day Storage: Toshiba 20Gb 2.5" IDE Version: 1.0.beta3-3 (debian unstable) Clients: Evolution (debian unstable) & Thunderbird on Windows. Connectivity: IPv6 (used mostly ;) and IPv4
And that box does a lot of other tasks making it very heavy. But as dovecot is super-fast it runs perfectly fine on such a box. (http://unfix.org/~jeroen/network/ ;) for a funnier fact, when this box had some disk issues a couple of weeks ago I used one of the Linksys NSLU2's in the list on the mentioned url for dovecot access. Those are ARM 266mhz's with only 32mb of mem and even *that* works fine.
Thanks to Ytti for pointing out at the time that dovecot was the best IMAP server, which IMHO it is ;)
A lot of kudo's and repect to Timo for such a great product (+s, as irssi is also great ;) !!!
Greets, Jeroen
My setup is as below
Server: Own build from the botom CPU: 1 Xeon 2.8 wih room to expand to 2 Motherboard: Intel 7320sp SCSI Controler: Adaptec 29320 (4 SCSI disks non raid) RAM: 1GB OS: CentOS 4.3 Users: ~120 mix of IMAPS(100) and POP3S(20) Auth: passwd/shadow Maildir size: 23GB Dovecot version: 0.99.11 (waiting for rpms for RHEL4/CentOS4) Client Software: Thunderbird, Squirrelmail, Outlook, Outlook Express
MTA level at same machine: Exim with Mailscanner,Mailwatch, Spamassassin, dcc, pyzor, razor2, Bitdefender, ClamAV
Regards JG
-- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
Setting the low end for organizations:
Server: Donated Dell Optiplex P3 800MHz RAM: 256MB OS: FreeBSD 6.0 Number of Users: ~5 IMAP, ~90 POP3 Auth: passwd Mailbox size: ~100MB in /var/mail (mbox); ~500MB in Maildirs Version: 1.0beta3 (from ports) Clients: Pine, Thunderbird, and Squirrelmail, but mostly Outlook
Ron Wilhoite
What I thought would be the low-end:
Server: White-box PIII 933Mhz RAM: 512MB OS: Fedora Core 1 Users: 8 IMAP Auth: passwd/NIS against SFU on AD Storage: Single 36GB SCSI drive Version: 1.0-test69 Clients: Outlook XP, Horde/IMP
Requires zero maintenance - zero reported problems. I did have to patch it to convert the username input to lowercase to get it to authenticate properly (since windows users aren't case sensitive but SFU is) but haven't touched the install since I built and installed the RPM. This system also runs MailScanner and sendmail.
-- Jeff Graves, MCSA Image Source, Inc. 508.966.5200 x31 www.image-src.com
What would be a nice variation on this 'competative' theme is: Who can claim the most number of IMAP users on a single box setup?
i.e. no external auth or disk mechanism. Just one. single. machine. (backup machines don't count of course)
Actually, based on what I'm seeing, the interesting point of competition may be more along the lines of "how much per-user mail can you successfully handle with Dovecot". Certainly, from the numbers, it seems our specs/storage for 150 users is in line with what many of you are using for 1K-10K+ users, and given all the issues we've had with indexes breaking, perhaps it's as a result of allowing 12GB single-user maildirs to exist?
Especially with beta5, we've seen our CPU/load staying very* low, but we are still seeing the dovecot.* corruption now and then, as well as some zombie imap processes, and occasional max open files exceeded...
-deano
On Thu, April 13, 2006 8:58 am, Daniel Watts wrote:
What would be a nice variation on this 'competative' theme is: Who can claim the most number of IMAP users on a single box setup?
i.e. no external auth or disk mechanism. Just one. single. machine. (backup machines don't count of course)
-- Dean Blackburrn IT Director VIZ Media
Here's mine:
Server: Some old P3 800 MHz RAM: 256 MB Number of Users: Just myself for now Authentication: MySQL Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 3 SMTP: Postfix 2.2.5 Email client software: Thunderbird 1.5, Mutt 1.5 OS: Gentoo Hardened Linux x86 (stable)
No problems so far :)
participants (26)
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Alan McKay
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Alan Premselaar
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Alexander Brüning
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Andrey Panin
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Chris Wakelin
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Cor Bosman
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Curtis Maloney
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Daniel Watts
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Dean Blackburn
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Dominik Saar
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Flavio Domingos
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grant beattie
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Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
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IT ＠ dooti.de
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Jeff Graves
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Jeroen Massar
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Jim Trigg
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Jørgen Giversen
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Marc Perkel
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Netlink Tech
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Petar Bogdanovic
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Remy Zandwijk
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Ron Wilhoite
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Todd Vierling
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Tomi Hakala
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Udo Rader