I designed and currently maintain a FreeBSD system with ~40,000 users, with probably 20-30,000 "active". I only support POP3 access presently, but I'm looking into IMAP. I'm using 2 PentiumII 300s running FreeBSD. One acts as the SMTP deliver-er for all off-site activity, the other the primary POP3 server. Both have 512M of RAM. The POP3 server has 14 4.5G cheetah drives, 2 internal for the OS, etc. and the other 12 inside CMD ultra-daytona external cacheing SCSI-SCSI RAID arrays (RAID-5), each on their own SCSI channel (2 3940UWs in each machine).
I use the qpopper with a *lot* of local modifications for security and performance. A custom perl+mysql system manages the userids locally and talks to a campus-wide "meta-directory" which allows people to manage the users from their Winblows machines...User management is probably a bigger problem than performance.
IO will be your biggest concern, followed closely by getpw* calls, network bandwith, then RAM and/or CPU. There are lots of other issues such as expiring mail, preventing/detecting mailbox corruption.
Cyrus IMAPd will solve a lot of problems with IO bandwidth, quotas, expiring mail, etc...but it will require more RAM to sustain more simultaneous connections, and more disk space as users can/will/should leave more mail on the server. I have not tested Cyrus in a large scale environment...yet...
Sendmail works well, other mailers such a qmail, etc. may work as well, many claim to be more efficient, but a properly configured sendmail environment is hard to beat...but any reasonable mailer should be adequate, the actual MTA load shouldn't be that great, no delivering to the mailbox, that's another story.
Feel free to contact me directly if you desire any more details or statistics.
I setup a Wincam under FreeBSD using a WinCam.one about 3 years ago. Certainly the AXIS is superior, but (in addition to not being available then) I had very little money to work with, and I was unable to run ether to the camera position, thus I needed the modem capabilities of the wincam.one (yes, I know, some of the newer AXIS cameras can do that too). I had a good experience with the WinCam, it ran flawlessly for over a year, and has since been redeployed (Though it's down right now as the area it's in is rewired for comm and power). And they have some simply multiplexing capabilities, however the image snap times are slow at 640x480x24 because of the serial line speed (high-speed serial is supported I think, >200K). Axis units and a little software to front-end them would probably be easiest and provide a higher-quality output, but would probably set you back $6k...x10.com has/had some tiny cameras with 2.4Ghz transmitters, these combined with reasonable video capture cards would provide an interesting solution the required little wiring. Though I'm not sure how you could caputre 6 images, or easily rotate through 6 video inputs...
After looking at some comments here and in preparation for some upgrades around here, I ran a couple of highly unscientific tests between 2 Ultra Sparc 5s and a FreeBSD-Stable machine. Just sharing drives and mapping them (100TX FullDuplex via Cisco 2924 on each) with no extra options got me about 1Meg/sec writes from the Sun to the Sun, and 6.5M/sec writes to the FreeBSD server. As a client, FreeBSD could only muster 800K/sec back to the sun. I need to move down another FBSD or Linux machine to attempt FBSD->FBSD system...
How can that be, that FreeBSD outperformed SOLARIS (2.6, patched), well, probably because the FreeBSD system has a CMD Ultra-Daytona cacheing (64M) SCSI RAID array versus 4 SCSI drives on the Ultra 5 (both systems using Adaptech 3940-ish cards). Now, some may call this cheating, but the cost of the FreeBSD HW/SW setup was only about $400 more than the SUN, and it has about 4G more space. (and we bought the Suns at edu discount, and the disks/controller 3rd party)
Now I admit that I don't know how stable this system will be under heavy use, it's been mostly just me for the past month or so. And Linux not having quite as 'finished' as v3 implementation or Journaling or similar FS (I'm also using softupdates under FreeBSD) may even be a few months behind FreeBSD, though it typically catches up quick when it falls behind in an area. So if you need a large, high-performance NFS server right now, lay out the cash for a NetApp. But if you are looking for something medium-performance/size and/or planning for a fall deployment, select a quality hardware cacheing RAID subsystem and I suspect FreeBSD and/or Linux will be able to easily outperform a similarly priced chunk of SUN hardware.
Also, of course, I've glossed over the essentially free Solaris/Intel, partly because I haven't had the resources to experiment with it, and partly because the last time I did (> 1year past), I was underwhelmed...
Slashdot Mirror
Dudes, this is OFN. I read this in my lame local newpaper's entertainment section weeks ago.
X-Files, TNG...coming soon I'm sure, and for those D.D. fans, there's always Red Shoe Diary episodes on showtime....
$1M for a 120K user SIMS, hahaha, mulitply that by 6 or 7 and you're talking...
sims looked/looks pretty nice though, if you can afford it!
I designed and currently maintain a FreeBSD system with ~40,000 users, with probably 20-30,000 "active". I only support POP3 access presently, but I'm looking into IMAP. I'm using 2 PentiumII 300s running FreeBSD. One acts as the SMTP deliver-er for all off-site activity, the other the primary POP3 server. Both have 512M of RAM. The POP3 server has 14 4.5G cheetah drives, 2 internal for the OS, etc. and the other 12 inside CMD ultra-daytona external cacheing SCSI-SCSI RAID arrays (RAID-5), each on their own SCSI channel (2 3940UWs in each machine).
I use the qpopper with a *lot* of local modifications for security and performance. A custom perl+mysql system manages the userids locally and talks to a campus-wide "meta-directory" which allows people to manage the users from their Winblows machines...User management is probably a bigger problem than performance.
IO will be your biggest concern, followed closely by getpw* calls, network bandwith, then RAM and/or CPU. There are lots of other issues such as expiring mail, preventing/detecting mailbox corruption.
Cyrus IMAPd will solve a lot of problems with IO bandwidth, quotas, expiring mail, etc...but it will require more RAM to sustain more simultaneous connections, and more disk space as users can/will/should leave more mail on the server. I have not tested Cyrus in a large scale environment...yet...
Sendmail works well, other mailers such a qmail, etc. may work as well, many claim to be more efficient, but a properly configured sendmail environment is hard to beat...but any reasonable mailer should be adequate, the actual MTA load shouldn't be that great, no delivering to the mailbox, that's another story.
Feel free to contact me directly if you desire any more details or statistics.
I setup a Wincam under FreeBSD using a WinCam.one about 3 years ago. Certainly the AXIS is superior, but (in addition to not being available then) I had very little money to work with, and I was unable to run ether to the camera position, thus I needed the modem capabilities of the wincam.one (yes, I know, some of the newer AXIS cameras can do that too). I had a good experience with the WinCam, it ran flawlessly for over a year, and has since been redeployed (Though it's down right now as the area it's in is rewired for comm and power). And they have some simply multiplexing capabilities, however the image snap times are slow at 640x480x24 because of the serial line speed (high-speed serial is supported I think, >200K). Axis units and a little software to front-end them would probably be easiest and provide a higher-quality output, but would probably set you back $6k...x10.com has/had some tiny cameras with 2.4Ghz transmitters, these combined with reasonable video capture cards would provide an interesting solution the required little wiring. Though I'm not sure how you could caputre 6 images, or easily rotate through 6 video inputs...
After looking at some comments here and in preparation for some upgrades around here, I ran a couple of highly unscientific tests between 2 Ultra Sparc 5s and a FreeBSD-Stable machine. Just sharing drives and mapping them (100TX FullDuplex via Cisco 2924 on each) with no extra options got me about 1Meg/sec writes from the Sun to the Sun, and 6.5M/sec writes to the FreeBSD server. As a client, FreeBSD could only muster 800K/sec back to the sun. I need to move down another FBSD or Linux machine to attempt FBSD->FBSD system...
How can that be, that FreeBSD outperformed SOLARIS (2.6, patched), well, probably because the FreeBSD system has a CMD Ultra-Daytona cacheing (64M) SCSI RAID array versus 4 SCSI drives on the Ultra 5 (both systems using Adaptech 3940-ish cards). Now, some may call this cheating, but the cost of the FreeBSD HW/SW setup was only about $400 more than the SUN, and it has about 4G more space. (and we bought the Suns at edu discount, and the disks/controller 3rd party)
Now I admit that I don't know how stable this system will be under heavy use, it's been mostly just me for the past month or so. And Linux not having quite as 'finished' as v3 implementation or Journaling or similar FS (I'm also using softupdates under FreeBSD) may even be a few months behind FreeBSD, though it typically catches up quick when it falls behind in an area. So if you need a large, high-performance NFS server right now, lay out the cash for a NetApp. But if you are looking for something medium-performance/size and/or planning for a fall deployment, select a quality hardware cacheing RAID subsystem and I suspect FreeBSD and/or Linux will be able to easily outperform a similarly priced chunk of SUN hardware.
Also, of course, I've glossed over the essentially free Solaris/Intel, partly because I haven't had the resources to experiment with it, and partly because the last time I did (> 1year past), I was underwhelmed...
It may not give your browser the same workload, but if you're into this chemical sort of geekdom, check out:
m l
http://www.uky.edu/~holler/periodic/periodic.ht