Re: Er.... for Sendmail users......enough

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Matthew Schumacher wrote:

> I found this interesting benchmark:
>
> http://www.isode.com/whitepapers/mbox-benchmark.html
>
> It shows cyrus as being a bit faster than courier which I suspected, but
> it also shows some new mailbox product as being much faster than cyrus.
>
> Anyway, given the performance difference I wonder if 2 cyrus machines (1
> active, 1 hot-standby) wouldn't perform the same as a 2 server cluster
> running courier.

That benchmark brings to mind some issues that I've been trying to
anticipate with the Cyrus solution. At some point there's only going to be
so much that you can do practically for vertical scalability. Doing a hot
fail-over w/LUN takeover off the SAN is fine for the redundancy requirement
(and virtually at no addtional hardware cost if you're using virtualization
products), but disk I/O is going to put a ceiling on the number of
concurrent users you can place per server.

I haven't touched murder yet (I'm a ways off of my ceiling) but some sort of
clustering is going to be necessary at some point. :-P Who knows, though,
4Gbps SAN fabrics are becoming more common. By the time I hit my ceiling a
hardware upgrade can raise it some more.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Bolverk's Lair -- http://arthur.corlissfamily.org/
           Digital Mages -- http://www.digitalmages.com/
           "Live Free or Die, the Only Way to Live" -- NH State Motto
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Thu Aug 31 09:29:08 2006