[Dovecot] unofficial Survey about your Dovecot server :) to compare with my own server setup...

[Daniel Watts]

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