Author Topic: any performance figures available?  (Read 4486 times)

Offline D43m0n

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any performance figures available?
« on: April 08, 2008, 01:45:50 PM »
Hi everyone,

I've searched the forum to find any solid info on performance statistics, but was unable to find anything I can relate to. I work at a university with about 30.000 students. Each student has an email account. We currently use IMP v3 (Horde v2) as a webmail server on a single server (dual Xeon based on P4, 1 GB memory). This server talks to a single IMAP server (Cyrus) (dual Xeon based on P4, 4 GB memory). The performance of this setup is awesome. The mailbox quota is currently set to 25 MB. We plan to upgrade the students webmail server this summer to a more redundant setup using Cyrus replication. The mailbox quota will probably go up to 1 GB. We're also looking at upgrading the webmail client (IMP) to something new. This might very well be the latest IMP, but I've stumbled upon Roundcube a few months ago. I tried Roundcube on my own server at home and I like it. Luckily it became stable a few weeks ago. Before considering on putting roundcube in any form of production service, I'd like to know if there are any performance figures out in the field. Current measurements show us that there are at least 500/600 active IMAP sessions at the peak moments on a single day. Will Roundcube perform in an exceptable manner with those numbers, on a single server (like we currently have)? We realize that with the increase in quota, the number of mailboxes and it's contents will increase. Will this affect the performance?

Any input is greatly appreciated.

Thnx.

Offline BlueC

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Re: any performance figures available?
« Reply #1 on: April 08, 2008, 05:34:13 PM »
Roundcube is a PHP/MySQL (server side) and javascript (client side) application. For performance the number of open IMAP sessions is not really relevant - thats more to do with your IMAP server which is already proven to be capable - more relevant is having a web server that can handle serving roundcube to 500/600 people at a time. From my experience roundcube does not have a high CPU or RAM load on either PHP (using Apache in my case) or on MySQL, but then I've never tested it with 500 concurrent users.

As your webmail server is seperate from your IMAP server the increase in quota won't affect roundcube's performance at all. I would suggest that a Dual Xeon P4 with 1GB of RAM would be more than capable of handling 500 concurrent roundcube sessions. You may need to tweak the MySQL and Apache config for best performance, or throw another gig or so of RAM at it. Someone else may know better, but I'd be surprised if you had any performance issues.

Offline andy9275

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Re: any performance figures available?
« Reply #2 on: April 08, 2008, 05:58:51 PM »
From everything I've seen using Roundcube (about 200-300 users) your students would hate it.

In our application (Opteron dual core 2 GB RAM webserver and separate IMAP mail server) anything over 10 MB mail boxes destroys usability.

If anyone is using Roundcube on at a wide distribution and not experiencing problems I'd love to here how you're doing it.

For example are you using MBOX or MAILDIR?  

Roundcube looks great and works well for us... but only if users keep their mail box small.

Offline BlueC

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Re: any performance figures available?
« Reply #3 on: April 09, 2008, 04:58:28 AM »
Quote from: andy9275
From everything I've seen using Roundcube (about 200-300 users) your students would hate it.

In our application (Opteron dual core 2 GB RAM webserver and separate IMAP mail server) anything over 10 MB mail boxes destroys usability.

Really? That surprises me. I use it with considerably bigger mail boxes and it doesn't even seem to slow down. I don't even see why the size of the mailbox would cause RoundCube to slow down (except maybe if the php IMAP module is a bit crappy). Does your IMAP server handles things OK when connecting from a different client, say Thunderbird/Outlook/OE? What about when you use a different webmail client (like squirrelmail for example)?

I am using Maildir format mailboxes with a courier-imap server. What version of PHP are you using?

Offline andy9275

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Re: any performance figures available?
« Reply #4 on: April 09, 2008, 01:30:47 PM »
Quote from: BlueC
Really? That surprises me. I use it with considerably bigger mail boxes and it doesn't even seem to slow down. I don't even see why the size of the mailbox would cause RoundCube to slow down (except maybe if the php IMAP module is a bit crappy). Does your IMAP server handles things OK when connecting from a different client, say Thunderbird/Outlook/OE? What about when you use a different webmail client (like squirrelmail for example)?

I am using Maildir format mailboxes with a courier-imap server. What version of PHP are you using?


We're running mbox and the mail server is usually used as a pop server. Only webmail uses the imap. Squirrelmail run from the same webserver works really well without taxing the server like roundcube does and with big mailboxes.