Any roundcube installations with >1000 user? and further questions...

[malte]

Hey there,

we want to set up a freemail service. The plan at the end is to have from 5000-10.000 users (or more if possible ). Every user shall have to used functions as you know them from other freemail services (but more space than web.de )

I heard from a webhoster that roundcube needs a lot of system ressources, especially when a huge amount of users are logged in on the same time.

So, how many users are using your Roundcube?

What do you think what server requirements do we need?

We thought about:

Quad Core
8-12 GB RAM
1.500 GB HDD
Unlimited Traffic (limited after 2 TB)
OS: Linux

Would one Server be enough?

We think about two ways...

1.Using RC and supporting the community in case of developing plugins and public them (just as a community works).
2. Using another Email-client

1: This is the option we would prefer, cause we can expand the software as we all need it
2: Only when RC doesn't meet our demands


So, what do YOU all think about that?

Thank you in advance

[rosali]

RoundCube does not consume much HDD space. I have 50% 15GB on my test environment used for about 200 users.

The only resource consuming part (RAM) I'm aware of is the attachment handling. This is a known issue and devs work on it.

[malte]

Yes, this is what our server distributor told us as well...RC is supposed to need a LOT of RAM.

But do you think that this is possible (and comfortable for the users of course) to run such a freemail service with RC?

Thx

malte

[bpat1434]

The issue isn't going to be RoundCube itself.  If you set it up right and limit the upload size for your mail service, you should be fine.

Roundcube (to my knowledge) doesn't consume that much except when you add an attachment.  So if you figure a max of 5 megs of ram per user in Roundcube, and you have 12 gigs of ram, you could potentially fit 1634 users simultaneously at once on your system if you have 8 gigs or 2457 users if you're using 12 gigs of ram.  Problem is, your Apache could potentially destroy your system UNLESS you configure each Apache instance to utilize no more than 5 megs of ram.

Since 5 megs per thread of Apache isn't really feasible (you'll really want like 16 - 32 megs per thread to ensure that there's room to grow).  So really it's 512 users in an 8 GB system or 768 in a 12 gig system (based on 16 MB per Apache thread).

Ultimately you need memory left over for your mail server, database, and other systems to run.  So you'll probably want to keep 1 - 2 gigs free for your system to actually run.  So really your 8 - 12 gigs is 6 - 10 gigs.

So realistically to have 5 - 10 thousand users running at once you'd need 10 - 20 servers, load balanced of course.  But that's to guarantee that there will be enough for 5 - 10 thousand concurrent connections.

What you have specced out for one server should be plenty to start with.  Or perhaps you could start with a load balancer, two servers, a dedicated mysql server, and a few dedicated mail servers.  But again, that's to guarantee that you can handle the load.