[horde] 100,000+ users - Thanks, + more questions

[Henry Blackman]

Hi,

I run Horde (but only IMP) at a University in the UK.  We have around 15,000
users, split into 3 groups, staff, staff at another campus and students.  In
all there are around 12,000 students on 1 server, and about 300 staff on
another with the remainder on the final server.

The server with 2,700 staff (on the main campus) runs busy all the time.  It
has the web server and the mail server all on the same box, and we have
around 130 users running at the same time with IMP open all day.  The box is
a dual PIII-1.13GHz with 512MB RAM and 2 120GB IDE disks with home areas
distributed across the 2 disks on seperate IDE channels.  It occasionally
gets very busy.

On the other hand we have the students (12,000 of them) on 1 much lower spec
server, but if we have 30 concurrent users, that's busy and the server does
just fine.  Again it's an all in 1 server doing web serving and mail.

The size of your servers will very much depend on the usage patterns of the
users.  I would recommend multiple server, or at least high speed SCSI
disks.  I've found SCSI disk arrays to perform better in a web environment
as they seem to be able to read small files quicker than IDE disks.  The
bottleneck for us is disk speed, and very rarely processor power.  I'll be
investing in more RAM for the box to boost performance, and if it doesn't
improve we'll certainly split the home areas across multiple servers for
sure.

Out of interest, we run IMAP Proxy to improve speed to the IMAP server, and
that really makes a difference on the staff server were people are
constantly reading, or browsing mail.  In addition we run PHP Accelerator
(www.php-accelerator.co.uk) which is a free "version" of Zend Cache.  I'm
sure it's not quite as good, but it makes a noticable difference for us.

Hope this helps.

Best,
Henry

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Adrian Teasdale" <adrian at justcompete.com>
To: <horde at lists.horde.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 7:32 AM
Subject: [horde] 100,000+ users - Thanks, + more questions


> Hi there
>
> May I say thanks to everyone who provided help with my previous question
> about using Horde.  I have now decided to recommend it to my potential
> client along with some changes and additional programming we will do for
him
> (if we get the job that is!). The help that you provided was very useful
and
> what I am trying to do seems like nothing in comparison to what some
people
> are using Horde for!
>
> For a base amount of users of 100,000 I would be interested in knowing
what
> hardware people would recommend.  Would it be wise to use a seperate
server
> for the email and one for the PHP applications or is it more complex than
> that? I appreciate that this list is relating to Horde, and my question
may
> appear a little OT, but I'm wondering what kind of setup I would need (in
> terms of hardware) to run 100,000 users who, we should assume, will be
using
> the system daily.
>
> Thanks
>
> Ade
>
>
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