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From: "Jonathan Tripathy" on 12 Feb 2010 12:14
Hi Folks,

How scaleable is postfix and dovecot, using mysql for user databases, on one server?

My current server has 256MB RAM (It's a VM on slicehost). How many users do you think that will handle?

How much RAM/CPU would I need to host 600 users? Please remember, that due to the nature of email, I imagine that the server won't be constantly hammered.

How much disk space do you think I'll need? I'm just looking for advice from someone with experience

Thanks

Jonny

From: Aaron Wolfe on 12 Feb 2010 12:39
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 12:14 PM, Jonathan Tripathy <jonnyt(a)abpni.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> How scaleable is postfix and dovecot, using mysql for user databases, on one
> server?
>
> My current server has 256MB RAM (It's a VM on slicehost). How many users do
> you think that will handle?
>
> How much RAM/CPU would I need to host 600 users? Please remember, that due
> to the nature of email, I imagine that the server won't be constantly
> hammered.
>

You'll probably find that one "heavy" user will take the resources of
10s or 100s of lightweight users. With only 600 users, you're not
going to get a lot of averaging so you'll have to figure out what your
specific users are going to need. 60 heavy users might bring the
server to it's knees, 6000 light users might work out fine.

It might be better to think in terms of messages per hour than number of users.

> How much disk space do you think I'll need? I'm just looking for advice from
> someone with experience
>
> Thanks
>
> Jonny
>
>

From: Stan Hoeppner on 12 Feb 2010 13:24
Aaron Wolfe put forth on 2/12/2010 11:39 AM:

> It might be better to think in terms of messages per hour than number of users.

Most importantly, who are these users? Are they customers? Members of some
society or club? Will these be their primary email accounts or secondary,
tertiary, etc? If these are nursing home residents you could get by with an old
386. ;)

Who are your users? The answer to this question will probably answer most of
the others.

--
Stan

From: Victor Duchovni on 12 Feb 2010 14:24
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 05:14:30PM -0000, Jonathan Tripathy wrote:

> My current server has 256MB RAM (It's a VM on slicehost). How many users do you think that will handle?

Is more RAM substantially more expensive? 256 MB is rather meek these days.
With physical servers, one typically gets 16GB or more of RAM these days.
Even a 6-Watt Atom-CPU FitPC box comes with 1GB of RAM! Your machine is
way off the mainstream memory curve... For Postfix alone you're fine, but
for running an IMAP server with users, you are likely too cramped, ask
on the Dovecot list, not here. Postfix is not very memory intensive.

--
Viktor.

P.S. Morgan Stanley is looking for a New York City based, Senior Unix
system/email administrator to architect and sustain our perimeter email
environment. If you are interested, please drop me a note.

From: Jonathan Tripathy on 12 Feb 2010 16:50
Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all the comments.

The reason why I said 256MB RAM, is because that is currently what my VM
has...

If I were to take out a dedicated server with:

2.8 Dual Core
2GB RAM

how much would that handle?

My customer is a business, with 600 staff, however I think they just use
a single broadband connection so that will be the limiting factor, as
this dedicated server has a 100Mbps link to the net..

Please let me know what you think

Thanks

Jonny

On 12/02/2010 19:24, Victor Duchovni wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 05:14:30PM -0000, Jonathan Tripathy wrote:
>
>
>> My current server has 256MB RAM (It's a VM on slicehost). How many users do you think that will handle?
>>
> Is more RAM substantially more expensive? 256 MB is rather meek these days.
> With physical servers, one typically gets 16GB or more of RAM these days.
> Even a 6-Watt Atom-CPU FitPC box comes with 1GB of RAM! Your machine is
> way off the mainstream memory curve... For Postfix alone you're fine, but
> for running an IMAP server with users, you are likely too cramped, ask
> on the Dovecot list, not here. Postfix is not very memory intensive.
>
>
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