Hosting providers

[tcarradine]

I was wondering if anyone was running Scalix on a collocated server and if so- what companies are you using?

I've got Scalix 11 running on a dedicated virtual package from Mediatemple.net currently but we're running into issues with the numfile setting in Virtuozzo. It seems that Scalix needs access to quite a few more (more than 19,000) files simultaneously once users start logging in. Mediatemple's best DV package can only handle 19,200 before it crashes.

Any comments/idea's would be great!

Thanks!

Tim

[arman.mt]

I've got Scalix 11 running on a dedicated virtual package from Mediatemple.net currently but we're running into issues with the numfile setting in Virtuozzo. It seems that Scalix needs access to quite a few more (more than 19,000) files simultaneously once users start logging in. Mediatemple's best DV package can only handle 19,200 before it crashes.

Any comments/idea's would be great!

Thanks!

Tim

Hey Tim!

We actually set up a testbed account to check this out for ourselves. We found out that with the default setup, there are about 7000 files that open that relate to scalix (doing an lsof | grep scalix | wc -l). To contrast, there were about 9000 open files total for all aspects of the server overall. That means that not counting files with the word 'scalix' in the name, there were only about 2000-2500 open files for all operations on the whole box.

We concluded after some more thorough examination that the cause of all the open files is the java server that scalix needs in order to run. You could probably tune down some of the resource settings to optimize the performance and file footprint of tomcat to bring things back to a reasonable level and operate in a stable fashion. This would be important to do in any sort of server environment - not just VPS - as more open files equates to more strain on your disks. One way to go is to throw more hardware and more resources, but the solution that will ultimately save you a lot of time and money would be to get the software itself running as lean as possible.

Hope this helps...

[tcarradine]

We actually set up a testbed account to check this out for ourselves.

One of the many reasons I'm sorry to leave your service for another! You guys have the best tech support I've ever come across.

That said, do you or anyone else here on the boards have any suggestions on how I could go about tuning down the Tomcat settings? I really have no idea where to even start.

Again, thanks for the reply Arman!

Tim

[arman.mt]

That said, do you or anyone else here on the boards have any suggestions on how I could go about tuning down the Tomcat settings? I really have no idea where to even start.

Again, thanks for the reply Arman!

Tim

Thanks a lot Tim, we always try to provide solid answers to these sorts of questions.

As far as a HOWTO on tuning tomcat, it's really such a massive beast that there's no one definitive source or document to follow. You'd have to have a pretty good understanding of tomcat to tune it. Unfortunately, I have no docs I can pass your way, but I'd suggest starting with the Tomcat Documentation and do some Google searches.

I wonder if anybody on these forums can provide some more insight for you, Tim...

Take care!

--Arman.

[albatroz]

Hello Tim,

Did you finally find a solution for your requirement?
Maybe another VPS technology? Xen?

[tcarradine]

We're currently hosting on a dedicated server from 1and1.com

I had to upgrade the OS (that was fun) to a newer version of Fedora (they only offered FC4 at the time) but after we did that it all worked okay. It's been up and running for about four months now- but we're having quite a few performance issues with it. Not sure if it's the hosting or Scalix or just my lack of technical knowledge. The biggest issue we've had is a growing spam problem- and without a built-in and supported anti-spam solution from Scalix we're really considering moving onto a different platform.

Tim

[Technica]

You might want to consider USinternet's esecurence program, I've been using it for a year now and get nearly no spam. Best part is since the mail is filtered at their site before final delivery you never waste your bandwidth on it. Before this solution our SPAM was over 70% of inbound mail. It is pretty cheap. www.usinternet.com
(no i dont' work for them in any way)

Oh, and setup is as easy as changing your MX records.

[tcarradine]

Thanks! I'll look into that to see if it will meet our needs.

Tim

[joako]

We use spamassassin yes it not offically scalix supported but it WORKS and it works well.

Anyone know how to auto-create rules for all current users and all new users so the spam mails get moved to the Junk E-mail folder without always having to do it manually?

[Valerion]

sxaa can be scripted to add rules for users. If you create a user using a script (or a SAC plugin) instead of SAC you can have sxaa run after creation. And you can then script something in perl using IMAP to auto-create the folders as well.

Or you can create a 3d file with the rules embedded and copy it to the new user's directory in the mailstore.