"Matthew Sims" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Uh, well...Squirrelmail is simply a webpage. The number of simultaneous > users is defined by the web server application, aka Apache.
Perhaps we view it differently. Apache is a web server. SquirrelMail and Horde are applications, written in PHP. I'm curious about user experiences deploying both, especially in terms of resource consumption and scalability. > IMAP doesn't HAVE to be on the same box. You can use SM to connect > to an another server running your mail. Yes. But both Squirrel and Horde must speak IMAP to the mail server, whether on localhost or remote. IMAP's nontrivial and introduces more load on the web app server than -- say -- a POP-based mail GUI. Or static web pages. I'm also quite interested in fault-tolerance. I can deploy a couple of physical boxes running SquirrelMail behind load balancers. But Squirrel stores stuff like user address books and preferences on the web server's disk; this obviously won't work in a load balanced arrangement where a client connection is just as likely to go to "the other" box. I could put the files on a back-end NetApp NFS server like I do for my (balanced) SMTP/IMAP mail servers; this may introduce NFS file locking problems and corruption by simultaneous access to the same NFS-resident file. (My SMTP/IMAP servers use Maildir to avoid NFS problems). Does Horde have these same implementation issues? How does it store preferences and such? It seems a much more resource-intensive application than the relatively simpler SquirrelMail, but I haven't done any benchmarks to compare the two. Basically it boils down to this question of web app scalability and resource needs: can I support a community of (say) 2500 people, where maybe 100 are actively using webmail at any given instant on a box like a Sun Netra running Slowaris with 1GB RAM? Or some 2GHz i86 box with 1GB running FreeBSD? If not, how are you folks worrying the scalability issue? While this isn't specifically a PHP question, I think scalability of PHP applications is germane to the list. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
