Hi All I've just come across this thread, so my personal experience
I've implemented MailPiler for my customer a few monts ago. The mail throughput for the server is about 5k mails a day. Also, the old archive was imported there. Old archive was historical MailArchiva which occupied about 1T when we started import. After import to MailPiler archive occupies less than 500GB In the matter of performance - archiva, MySQL db and Sphinx are on separate Luns connected via FC. Machine has 4 CPUs and 8GB RAM and it is Ubuntu 12.04 hosted on vSphere. I don't know much more details about hardware, as this is customer's environment. In the matter of performance, initially we had some issues with Sphinx, but problem was very simple - delta indexing during import was taking so long, that next iteration of index rotate has been started before previous one was finished. Increasing time between iterations and some basic tuning of MySQL and Sphinx solved the problem. I have no contact with the customer since February, so I assume MailPiler works perfectly and without issues cheers, Ser@fin On 05/06/2013 10:16 AM, Janos SUTO wrote: > > Hello, > > On 2013-05-06 07:11, Hoang Tuan Viet wrote: >> >> 1. I have not heard about Piler scalability yet. >> >> Could I store 1 billion emails with Piler? How about the performance >> of Piler and MySQL? > > I have no experience with such a load, however I think that a billion > emails should be distributed among several piler hosts. Note that the > storage requirements depend greatly on your specific emails (average > message size, how much dedup and compression can help, number of users, > etc.) > > The demo site has 1.26 million emails (from ubuntu-bugs@ and linux-kernel@ > lists + 500k enron test emails). They occupy 6.5 GB on the disk + 4.2 GB > sphinx index files + 3.7 GB mysql files ~= 15 GB total, ~12 GB / one > million emails. It yields to 12 TB for 1 billion emails. > > Note that these emails are usually small (average 6kB) with few attachments > only, and thus compression and dedup can help little. For real world > scenarios, > I'd count with 30-40 TB disk space for a billion emails. > > Sphinx supports distributed indices, so you can spread the load among > several > hosts. It's also a good practice to create several index entries for sphinx > even if you use a single computer only. On my low end desktop pc where > the demo > resides, it takes 7-8 minutes until the delta index is merged to the 1.3 > GB big > main index. > > For mysql you have to store 1 billion entries in the metadata table, 5-6 > billion > entries in the rcpt table, and cca. 200 million entries in the > attachment table. > > Even though mysql supports partitioning, and other fancy features, I > would definitely > use a mysql cluster to store that much data. > > From 0.1.23 piler supports a server_id variable to allow you combining > several (<255) > piler hosts into a single view, so you may decide to put only 100 > million emails to 1 > node. > > End users access piler via the web based gui, and you are allowed to > create a machine > solely for the purpose of serving web clients only (having no piler, no > mysql, no > sphinx, just a usual LAMP installation). If your users use the archive > heavily then > you may install more than 1 LAMP computers to act as the gui only. > > I didn't mention any redundancy (other than the mysql cluster), but you > should definitely > have some sort of protection against losing a node. It depends on your > environment. Eg. > if you have a redundant storage your nodes may use, then you are > protected from data loss, > so if a node is down, you may replace it easily. > > Note that piler also supports exporting your emails to a secondary > storage. It's also a good > practice to use the pilerexport utility to dump all the emails of the > previous day to a > secondary storage, eg. a tape or cheap sata raid array, etc. > > Perhaps the other list members have much greater piler installations, > and they share their > experiences. > > >> 2. I have checked that there are number of files in piler/store that >> is close to number of emails. Do you store 1 email in 1 file? > > Yes. If a message has attachments, then they are stored as separate files, > eg. 1 email with two attached files are 3 files under the store directory. > > > Janos > >
