Hi folks,
Well, capacity planning is always based upon a kind of traffic matrix.
You must have (at least an estimate of) the traffic that is to flow
between the hosts and the servers.
I suggest that you deploy an experimental platform for a few schools
which will give an average estimate of the number and the size of
messages that travel through your mail server per POP account. You have
also to get an idea about how often users chack their mailboxes.
If this experimentation doesn't look practical. You can try guessing but
you'll be much more likely to run out of resources soon. For example, it
makes sense to think that a student's mail queue is in average 100KB
big.
I'm not very familiar with large installations but I think you'd better
worry about network bandwidth rather than disk space or Web server
response times! The remarks by Jason are very important, I think that
even if Linux is rock-stable, Linus didn't think about keeping it
running when power if off :) It's very easy to have a highly-available
system with Linux: RAID + UPS-controlled autoshutdown + IP automatic
takeover + ..
Conclusion: If the risk is high enough I suggest that you build a
traffic matrix from a prototype installation: you'll need, mail queues
sizes on mail servers, hits per day on web servers and MBytes per day on
network links. If, for some reasons, experimentation is not possible, I
suggest that you build a very approximate system and keep an eye on it
so that you can upgrade it easily.
I hope you good luck!
-Imed
"Rakers, Jason" wrote:
>
> I would think it is smart to put each school on a separate mail server, but
> 60 mail servers is a lot, so maybe if you divide among 6 servers. I am not
> familiar with sizing, but I am looking from a disaster recovery view. If
> XYZ school is having email problems, you (and them) don't want ABC and QRS
> schools also having problems. Sounds like a very nice project.....I am a
> little green...
>
> Jason
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: support [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Sent: Monday, January 17, 2000 6:32 PM
> > To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
> > Subject: Capacity Planning
> >
> >
> > Hi
> >
> > Re: Capacity Planning
> >
> > I have a nice project on a 3 year contract.
> >
> > We will be developing a web site to be used by 60 schools.
> >
> > There will be 1 domain name used for the school, for arguments sake lets
> > say "schools.com" and
> > this will be sectioned off per school with the same pages for each
> > school. + each school will also have there own .edu domain for email and
> > email for school.com domain
> >
> > So it will be main page, school1, section1, section2, section3 and
> > School2, section1, section2, section3 etc upto school 60 and could be 20
> > sections per school
> >
> > 60 Schools x 400 pupils per school
> >
> > Each school has 10Mb link to Internet ( lets say they only have 20
> > computers per school)
> >
> > 400 x 60 email addresses are required of .edu addresses 24,000 addresses
> > + teachers addresses
> > 400 x 60 email addresses are required for .com addresses 24,000
> > addresses+ teachers addresses
> > (I can write scripts to setup email accounts imported from text files in
> > batches)
> >
> > I was thinking of running Linux 6.1, Coldfusion 4.5 and MySQL for the
> > database
> > (I could run clustercats and spread the load over multiservers for
> > Coldfusion - is this likely to be necessary)
> > Apache 1.3.6 for the web server
> > Sendmail 8 for email
> >
> > There is of course day time usage and evening usage for pupils doing
> > homework etc.....
> > Parents may also connect for information + the internet could bing in
> > other users
> > (there may also be a chat area)
> >
> > My question is how many email pop boxes can I put on 1 server?
> >
> > How many concurrent connetctions will a server cope with for http
> > requests?
> >
> > (Say the server is a PIII 700 512Mb Memory Hardware RAID)
> >
> > Anyone any ideas on this, or could point me in the right direction.
> >
> > Many Thanks
> >
> > Tony
> > -
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> -
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--
Imed Chihi
Lucent Technologies Systel
http://www.linuxfreak.com/~chihi
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