the mail, the indices, and the mailboxes.db. Each can be on
separate storage with optimal price vs performance characteristics
for the proposed load.
We have 48000 mailboxes on behalf of 2000 users, with typically 1700
imapd processes during the day and ~1000 overnight. There's about
3.4TB of mail stored.
We run Cyrus 2.3.9 (12p1 is due for the next time the machine has a
maintenance window) in a Solaris zone (container) on a Sun T2000 with
16GB of RAM. The load on the machine is typically low:
We have mailboxes.db and the metapartitions on ZFS, along with the
zone iteself. The pool is drawn from space on four 10000rpm SAS
drives internal to the machine:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
pool1 ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t0d0s4 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t1d0s4 ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t2d0s4 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t3d0s4 ONLINE 0 0 0
They're fairly busy, mostly with writes (1 second resolution):
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 10 77 472K 509K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 65 0 1.09M
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 2 521 1.98K 3.03M
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 2 170 255K 951K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 37 0 249K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 35 0 310K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 2 22 16.3K 430K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 9 660 284K 4.65M
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 118 506 296K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 2 0 27.7K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 4 39 96.0K 990K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 1 89 1013 997K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 3 775 56.4K 5.06M
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 160 0 531K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 20 0 118K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 11 0 83.2K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 41 0 595K
pool1 39.4G 38.6G 0 624 1013 3.46M
This indicates that most client-side reads are being serviced from
cache (as you'd expect with 16GB of RAM). We have 21.4GB of meta data
on disk, which we run with ZFS compression to reduce IO bandwidth (at
the expense of CPU utilisation, of which we have plenty spare). The
ZFS compression ratio is about 1.7x: cyrus.cache, in particular, is
very compressible.
The message store is out on the `archive' QoS of a Pillar Axiom AX500,
so the data's living in the slow regions of SATA drives, that would
otherwise go to waste. We see ~20ms for all reads, because they are
essentially random and have to come up from the spindle of the NFS
server. Writes go to mirrored RAM on the server at take ~2ms.
Because most clients cache content these days, the load on those
partitions is much lower. Ten seconds' of sar output yields:
10:47:34 device %busy avque r+w/s blks/s avwait avserv
[...]
nfs73 16 0.2 10 84 0.0 15.6
nfs86 43 0.4 24 205 0.0 18.5
nfs87 1 0.0 3 152 0.0 7.2
nfs96 2 0.0 6 369 0.0 6.9
nfs101 0 0.0 1 35 0.0 5.0
nfs102 0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0
ian
----
Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/
Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki
List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
