[imp] imp benchmarking

[Chris Crowley]

> >Alternatively, can anyone share what hardware platform(s) they have
> needed
> >to support x number of thousands of users?
>

I can tell you that an IBM Netfinity with on 128MB ram, and 1 500 MhZ
processor is barely sufficient to sustain IMP server for a University
environment with approx. 20K users.

The webmail service has not been fully deployed, and the server still gets
in panics so often that I have a script running to restart the Apache server
when the load on the machine sky rockets.

This mess prompted us to relocate IMP to a Sun 4 with 2 350MhZ , and 1 Gig
ram. This machine is our backup mail-server. It was underutilized, and seems
to be the right tool for the job.  We already have users overseas (traveling
faculty and students studying abroad) who are checking their mail through
IMP.

> >We would like to get a better idea of what it will do to a server, as we
hope to
> >release it to a campus community of around 20K users.

One important configuration change that I had to make was the max.
connections for mysql. I set it to 350, and this seems to be sufficient. As
the max. used statistics show a peak of 195.

And if you haven't installed phpMyAdmin already, I recommend it.  Can anyone
recommend any other tools for web administration of  MySQL databases?

Chris