This brings up an interesting point about the performance of vpopmail and
possibly tuning options. Does anyone have information about how much of a
load a server can handle using the different authentication backend provided
by vpopmail. Currently, vpopmail supports, in some way, MySQL, Open LDAP,
Oracle, Syabse(Inter7's spelling but I have a feeling they mean Sybase).
I have many friends that have had *terrible* problems with LDAP. This is
mainly due to a threads issue during queries to the LDAP server, which
queues queries behind each other instead of parallel processing them.
I am currently running the MySQL backend of vpopmail and find the
performance acceptable but not impressive. I prefer the database option for
a multitude of different reason so I am willing to compromise on speed. But
I don't know how much I am compromising.
The other options (Oracle and Sybase) are commercial packages and I don't
have them hanging around.
There are testing tools out there for http tests
(http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#LOAD) . It would (probably with
standard disclaimer) not be hard to modify these tools to do something
similar except for a pop3 client. I looked through freshmeat and could not
find any testing tools for pop3 or IMAP. Does anyone know of a pop3 testing
tool? I find it hard to believe that nobody in the open source community
has not had this same question before and done something about it.
If the tools exist or it is created, what would be the suit of tests to
performance evaluate a configuration and what are valid configuration
(database server is local vs. database server accessed via a tcp/ip
socket.). Here is my initial list to consider
*Test*
Pop 3 connections
inbound Mail processing test
outbound mail relay-open based on ip address obtained through pop
authentication
*Configurations*
Qmail 1.03 with patches
Vpopmail with .cdb option
Vpopmail with mysql (server local)
Vpopmail with open ldap (server local)
Vpopmail with mysql (server distant)
Vpopmail with open ldap (server distant)
The other side of this question is what can be done to speed up the process
of pop3 access. I don't have any answers here.
Matthew
-=
-----Original Message-----
From: michael [mailto:michael]On Behalf Of Michael Boman
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2000 1:14 AM
To: Bill Shupp
Cc: VPopMail
Subject: Re: Large Scale site questions..
Bill Shupp wrote:
>
> Is anyone using vpopmail with 20,000+ users (multiple domains), offering a
web
> based client and allowing other POP clients? If so, what web-based client
is
> being used, and what kind of hardware is being used? We're going to be
setting
> up such a system for a customer, and I'm looking for any tips/advice that
others
> can offer.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bill Shupp
We have 41 domains and total around 250k accounts using .cdb to store
our users. Why we don't use mySQL is because it would kill the mySQL
database with the number of pop3 connections our users do.
It's a cluster with 4 nodes running qmail+vpopmail and 2 NFS servers.
Look at the attached 'dia' layout (the program 'dia' can be found at
freshmeat.net).
This is not a final layout, we already have plans to use LDAP to auth.
our users and decentralize our servers, but vpopmail's LDAP module is
not ready yet for it (ie: you can't create users or split them over
several machines/cluster of machines).
We used software, hardware and techniques from:
http://www.qmail.org/
=====================
qmail, daemontools, ucspi-tcp etc.
http://www.inter7.com/vpopmail/
===============================
VPopMail auth. module
http://www.inter7.com/qmailadmin/
=================================
Web based email administration
http://www.inter7.com/sqwebmail/
================================
WebMail interface.
http://www.linux-ha.org/
========================
High availability for linux.
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/
==================================
Load balancer ideas.
http://www.f5.com/
==================
BigIP load balancer.
http://www.ibm.com/
===================
4x Netfinity 4000R (2x PIII 750 MHz CPU, 512 Mb RAM, 2x9 Gb UW-SCSI HDD)
for the nodes
2x Netfinity 1000 (can't remember the specs - old recycled machines) for
the NFS servers.
http://www.inter7.com/qmail/
============================
For 24x7 support.
Best regards
Michael Boman
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