Roger Thomas writes: > if sky is the limit, what is the best/recommended mail system setup that i > should pursue to have an optimised courier/qmail/ldap setup that is going to > host couple of thousands of users? > > - do i buy a fat server, install everything inside?
A Pentium 100 should be enough for "a couple of thousand" users, unless you are talking about a user profile waaaaaay outside the bell curve (100mb mailboxes each, extensive searches, etc...) > - do i buy 3 server each for qmail, ldap and courier imap? > - performance issue ? > - server memory size? > - number of cpu ? > - max number of user per server. how do i limit this ie to implement, say, 5000 > users on server A and the next 5000 users on server B so on and so forth? > - can i use your suggestion for a distributed architecture? An intelligent answer will require more information, such as the expected usage profiles. Otherwise, you'll have to do with a generic answer that's based on the center of the bell curve. The answer for that, as I said, is that a cheap Pentium will be enough. In general, I'll spend all my money on the hard disks. You want to get high qualify, fast, SCSI hard disks that are rated for the highest MTBF you can get, and you want to stick them in a fault tolerant RAID box. That's where your family jewels end up ultimately. Everything else can be replaced or upgraded without losing any data: server CPU, server RAM, the network architecture. Having to replace the disks is the only thing that you want to avoid at all (excepting, of course, routine RAID failures that can be hot-swapped right away). For insurance, get a big tape and dump the mail store to tape each day, so even if the disks and the raid boxes blow up, you'll cut your losses. With maildirs you can do this live. The tape is only insurance, design the disks so that they never fail in the first place. I hear that some high end RAID boxes come with slots that swallow tapes, and do the backups by themselves. That just rocks. -- Sam _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
