[imp] IMP performance under load

[Rich Lafferty]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 03:51:04PM +1000, Stephen Fischer (sfi@unsw.edu.au) wrote:
> I'm evaluating IMP, along with a couple other IMAP web mail clients, and have
> just talked to someone who was experiencing a very high load on the machine
> running the web server.  He said that they were seeing a sustained load of
> about 100 running IMP 2.2.4 on a dual-processor SGI 3200.

Something is seriously wrong with their system. Our 17000 users on a
two-proc DS10 (a roughly equivalent machine) can hardly be felt; the
person you were talking to really needs to sit down and figure out
what's wrong with that machine. (Of course, I scratch my head over the
idea of a sysadmin not realizing that a sustained load over, say, 4 on
a dual-proc box is a sign of a problem.)
 
> I was wondering a couple things.  First, has anyone else had experience with
> SGI machines and has suggestions?  Second, has anyone seen this sort of load
> in a solaris environment, which is what we're going to be running here?  And
> third, I would like to see what sort of hardware you're using if you have a
> user environment that is at all close to ours:
> 
>     ~40 000 users 
>     expected 150-200 concurrent users, although that guess could be wildly
>         off since we only have POP usage stats at the moment.

We've got ~20 with around the same concurrent usage, and a Compaq
AlphaServer DS10 with two 500MHz processors, just under a gig of ram,
and lots and lots of disk is our general purpose mail server (pop and
IMAP), student and faculty and staff general-purpose shell box,
secondary nameserver, secondary mail exchanger for the entire
University, webmail box, online learning system... you get the
idea. :-)

What were you thinking of picking up, out of curiosity?

  -Rich

-- 
------------------------------ Rich Lafferty ---------------------------
 Sysadmin/Programmer, Instructional and Information Technology Services
   Concordia University, Montreal, QC                 (514) 848-7625
------------------------- rich@alcor.concordia.ca ----------------------