Large Roll-Out

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with large mailserver
rollouts - I am looking at having about 75000 users at a single site in
a years time and need a mail solution that would be able to scale to
this amount of usage. We are using Sendmail at the moment and handling
about 5000 users but I am not sure how well it scales. I also need to
know the best hardware setup to use eg: clustering etc.


Thanks in advance
Dominic.

Re: Large Roll-Out

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, dombid wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with large mailserver
> rollouts - I am looking at having about 75000 users at a single site in
> a years time and need a mail solution that would be able to scale to
> this amount of usage. We are using Sendmail at the moment and handling
> about 5000 users but I am not sure how well it scales. I also need to
> know the best hardware setup to use eg: clustering etc.

Many sites have scaled sendmail-based email facilities to much larger user
communities than 75,000. It can be done; and it *is* done.

There is no one single "magic bullet" that creates scalability. No
single hardware configuration, or software package, will create a
scalable solution by itself.

There are, however, numerous mistakes that can be made that will ruin
scalability. High on the list of mistakes is a single monolith that is
expected to do everything.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

Re: Large Roll-Out

dombid wrote:

> I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with large mailserver
> rollouts - I am looking at having about 75000 users at a single site in
> a years time and need a mail solution that would be able to scale to
> this amount of usage. We are using Sendmail at the moment and handling
> about 5000 users but I am not sure how well it scales.

For Sendmail tuning tips, I highly recommend Nick Christenson's book
"Sendmail Performance Tuning": http://www.jetcafe.org/npc/book/sendmail/

It's (obviously) Sendmail-specific, but there's a lot of information
that applies to large mail systems in general. It's a gold-mine.

Regards,

David.