Performance Notes

Performance issues for you to consider. If you never expect to have more than 100 simultaneous users, chances are any hardware you have will be fine. If you plan on having thousands or more users, please be sure to review this section.

If your configuration directory is not /var/imap, adjust accordingly.

In general, there's no magic bullet for performance. It depends on your hardware, your operating system, and how your users use the system. In general, an imapd process takes up anywhere from 256 Kbytes of memory to 512 Kbytes when it is first fired up. CPU has not been a big deal, but it may become more important as the imap sessions are encrypted and now that searching may be more frequent. Disk I/O is probably the most important and having a hardware RAID subsystem with an amount of write-back cache would be a good thing.

Finally, if you are talking about less than 100 interactive users it is likely that any relatively modern hardware can support it. If you are talking about having more than 1000 interactive users, you should know how to predict your utilization, go overboard on hardware, be willing to suffer growing pains, or be able to hire someone that can help.

There are a number of good performance tuning articles out for Solaris by Adrian Cockcroft. Go to your favorite search engine and look for his name.


last modified: $Date: 2003/01/02 19:23:11 $