This is probably getting a little offtopic (okay, a lot and my last for today) but I'll answer what I can. Now I can't speak for Horde but I can't see how Horde would be any different than what Squirrelmail provides.
> "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. I can't speak for mass deployment, but I can't see why it would be any different if 5 people log on at once or 100 people log on. Apache is proven to support enterprise level websites. Your network is your bottleneck. Distribute the load. > >> 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. There's a difference between what POP and IMAP does. Basically, do you want your users to view mail from one computer only (laptops, desktops) with no worries about disk space or from any computer (terminals all around the area) with email stored on the mail server. http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/email/imap-pop.html > > 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). Not nessessarily. Squirrelmail takes advatages of databases. You can have, say, a MySQL database server that all your load balanced Squirrelmail servers can access to retrieve user info such as logins, addresses and preferences. In fact, this would be a recommended way if you're planning on serving mass users. Stick a fiber connection between the two and you're set for bandwidth. > > 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. > Not sure, but if Horde supports databases then that would be the way to go for storing preferences and such. I don't know about resources comparisons, though. Also, Squirrelmail supports PostgreSQL which might be a better database for performace. Squirrelmail website offers some perfomance tips: http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/en_US/SquirrelMailPerformance > > 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. > I'm not sure how scalability comes into play with PHP. If you have 50 users online and suddenly it doubles up to 100 users, can your network and servers handle the sudden rush? PHP is going to output HTML no matter what. It's the server environment that determines whether it can handle the load. And since you mentioned a load balanced network you're already on the right track. That will solve your scalability issues. Need another server due to the increase of users? Add another web server to the load. Just keep your mail, web and database servers seperate with maybe fiber connections (if possible) between them to reduce latency. Okay...I think that's enough off topic discussions today. :) -- --Matthew Sims --<http://killermookie.org> -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
