On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 02:34:50PM -0400, Forrest Aldrich quoth: > When scaling to a system that supports potentially 100's of thousands of > users (and irregardless of which MTA), how to deal with the issue of > users performing IMAP indexing and searches? If your mailstore is NFS > mounted, even over GigE, there are some serious demands on the network, > mailstore, etc. How to remedy this scenario?
That's an easy question to answer: identify your bottlenecks, and then address them. Is GigE a bottleneck for you? If it is you may want to look into either isolating it (making the connection from IMAP server to NFS server be a dedicated line), or connecting to your shared storage via a different mechanism (e.g. Myrinet, Fibre, etc.). Is NFS a bottleneck for you? If it is, you may want to look into either accellerating your NFS server (optimizing it or what have you), using a different network filesystem (e.g. GFS or AFS or something similar, which allows you to spread your storage over several systems and allows your client to cache the files it's using), or not using a network filesystem at all. Is the load of doing indexing and searching the bottleneck? If so, boost the CPU and ram of the IMAP server, and look into doing load-balancing over several IMAP servers. If you're looking to predict this ahead of time, start doing some of the math: how many concurrent connections do you expect, how much data do you expect each to request, how much traffic can your NFS/GigE combo transfer, etc. ~Kyle -- I would be delighted to offer any advice I can on understanding women. When I have some I'll let you know. -- Jean Luc Picard
pgpT2A4nJAAS3.pgp
Description: PGP signature
