1 (edited by mmh 2011-11-18 18:51:13)

Topic: iRedMail performance

Hi

Anyone who can share some experience with how well iRedMail handles high load?
How many mails can your setup handle?
Anyone needed to split iRedMail onto more than one server?

We are about to switch an old setup to iRedMail.
We receive about 10.000 mails per day (most of it likely spam), on 100+ domains, with about 700 accounts in total.
Most users use pop3, but there is some imap usage.
The server we plan to use for iRedMail is a Xen based VPS, 4 Xeon cores, 4GB RAM and SAS disks with raid1 and LVM on top.

Think we should worry about performance?

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2

Re: iRedMail performance

mmh wrote:

We receive about 10.000 mails per day (most of it likely spam), on 100+ domains, with about 700 accounts in total.
Most users use pop3, but there is some imap usage.
The server we plan to use for iRedMail is a Xen based VPS, 4 Xeon cores, 4GB RAM and SAS disks with raid1 and LVM on top.

Think we should worry about performance?

I don't think there will be a performance issue.

- "10,000 mails per-day", one of the keys of mail server performance is how many mails will enter after-queue processing and eat system resource, if you can hugely reduce them (rejecting SPAMs) in before-queue processing, your server will not be under heavy load. If most of them are spam, greylisting will save lots of system resource for you. Refer to http://greylisting.org/ for more detail about greylisting.
- POP3/IMAP server (Dovecot) performance is great.

A safer way to migrate from old server is, migrating some of them at first time, monitoring the system performance, then migrate some more if you are happy with its performance.

Also, search "000" in iRedMail Success Stories page will show you some cases which hosting more than 1000 mail accounts with iRedMail.

3 (edited by mike.f 2011-11-21 01:31:55)

Re: iRedMail performance

mmh wrote:

Hi

Anyone who can share some experience with how well iRedMail handles high load?
How many mails can your setup handle?
Anyone needed to split iRedMail onto more than one server?

We are about to switch an old setup to iRedMail.
We receive about 10.000 mails per day (most of it likely spam), on 100+ domains, with about 700 accounts in total.
Most users use pop3, but there is some imap usage.
The server we plan to use for iRedMail is a Xen based VPS, 4 Xeon cores, 4GB RAM and SAS disks with raid1 and LVM on top.

Think we should worry about performance?

iRedMail is a composition of many packages. So there is a lot of ways to tweak your config wink

# For your incoming mails it's postfix that handles it. 100+ domains are No Problem
# for your "spam" - this might be handled before accepting them (using RBL blacklists and greylisting)
# the 700 accounts are handled with "dovecot" - no problem either smile

# 4 core should work quite nice
# you might rethink of the 4 GB RAM as a bit more of it gives you more performance here. maybe you seek for 8 GB
# and use a 64bit system...

don't forget to align your mail-storage-disks (the disk you mount to /var/vmail ) - this will give you a few % performance
and use a bigger inode-count (using -T news) when formatting - as mails are usually rather small

AND my own opinion: stick to a "server"-distrubution like debian or CentOS - the others are good for desktop-click-around wink

4

Re: iRedMail performance

Thanks for your replies. We will take a look at your suggestions smile

We already used greylisting for 25% of the domains, and we are sure it will help reject a lot of spam.
Unfortunately we have to migrate all users at the same time to avoid customers having to change anything in their clients. But we have tested the setup with a few test domains.

5

Re: iRedMail performance

Just thought I would let you know that the migration went without problems, and there are no problems with performance on the server. I think it easily could handle a lot more traffic. Nice job iredmail smile

We found a few minor bugs in iredadmin (ldap). Is there somewhere we should report them?

6

Re: iRedMail performance

mmh wrote:

We found a few minor bugs in iredadmin (ldap). Is there somewhere we should report them?

You can post in forum "iRedAdmin-Pro support", or mail me (zhb _at_ iredmail.org) directly.
Thanks for your feedback. smile