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List:       sqwebmail
Subject:    Re: [sqwebmail] Number Of Users Guideline?
From:       Brian Candler <B.Candler () pobox ! com>
Date:       2003-08-28 20:07:54
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On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 10:03:06AM -0700, rkl wrote:
> Are there guideline for the number of users on a email system consisting of 
> sqwebmail/qmail/linux/intel? 
> 
> Also, how much diff on number of users for hardware as below: 
> 
> intel 2.4 w/2G ram =
> intel 2.4 w/4G ram =
> intel 3.x w/2G ram =
> intel 3.x w/4G ram = 

It's hard to make guidelines as it depends very much on usage patterns.
However your limiting factor is unlikely to be CPU or RAM, but more likely
disk I/O.

qmail will hit its spool area hard when accepting incoming mails, and then
the reading and writing messages to and from the maildirs will also hit the
disk hard.

If you think it's going to be a busy server, then install multiple hard
drives, and spread your maildirs across them. Probably dedicate another disk
to the qmail spool area. SCSI drives will give the best performance. Start
with 512MB of RAM and a 2GHz CPU (or whatever is the cheap end these days)
and spend the rest on good performance hard drives. And if you chose IDE,
give each drive its own dedicated controller (i.e. don't put master and
slave on the same IDE bus)

Regards,

Brian.

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