RE: Ok, I'll show my ignorance...please help...?

[Per Steinar Iversen <PerSteinar.Iversen@adm.hioslo.no>]

On Tue, 30 Mar 1999, Shawn Rutledge wrote:

> > We're running Cyrus IMAP on linux now, and are really happy with it.  I'm
> > not sure to what extent it's a memory hog, but since it is an
> > inetd service
> > there's one process per connection it's not exactly lightweight.
> > Regardless is seems to be doing pretty well with 20-50 user connections at
> > any given time.
> 
> However, it stores each email in a
> separate file, and so it soon became impossible to even do an ls in the mail
> directory.  (I tried once - I believe I left it for a few hours and came
> back and it was still thrashing the hard drive to death.)  But with all that
> email, I believe Cyrus took up a few tens of megs of memory when a
> connection was active.  That caused a lot of swapping on that system (I had
> 20 megs in it at the time).  Multiple users with that much mail would have
> been devastating.

My site uses Cyrus for 1200 users, on Pentium-II 400MHz box, 392MB RAM.
It works like a dream even with 800 simultaneous users. The box runs
RedHat 5.2. In general it is not a good idea to collect too many
files in one directory when using ext2fs, not matter what application.

-psi