Server Specification

[Garyc]

Hi All, I am new to linux and scalix. Over the last few months i have been setting up SUSE/Scalix CE.I am evaluating several systems for groupware requirements. Everything does work but the whole system is so slow it is unusable. There are 18 users on the system, and im staring to get abusive phone calls about the speed !!!. 2 users have circa 25,000 emails in their store, while the other 16 users have an average of 5,000 emails. An unusual request was that everyone sees everyone else's calendar. When i implement this through delegation it takes about 20 minutes to open outlook, and when i click on another users calendar, that takes about 2 minutes to open, and likewise with the other 14 calendars. Basically I have been given a deadline till the end of the week to either sort this out, or drop it. I really do like scalix and have invested *ALOT* of time in this. Can someone tell me if Scalix server can support these requirements, and could other users relate their experiences on the speed of scalix . The box im using is a Sempron 2800 with 2gb ram, 2 x 80gb 72000rpm IDE HDDs. Many Thanks

[ScalixSupport]

Hi,

you will need to reorganize the calendar situation to get good performance. Instead of everyone sharing everyone's calendar, setup one group calendar that is shared.

Also, one of the reasons for the performance might be recurring meetings that go far, very far into the future. We had customers with recurring appointments going out for years - that will slow things down as well tremendously.

Cheers,

Sascha.

[mephisto]

you will need to reorganize the calendar situation to get good performance. Instead of everyone sharing everyone's calendar, setup one group calendar that is shared.

We have quite similar requirements and I don't know if this is the right solution for us. We have around 35 users and if a e.g. customer tries to reach a colleague of mine and I answer his phone, I need to be able to see where my colleague is. IMHO this can only be reached with delegate access.
Will delegates slow down my server even if I don't have the delegated folders open in Outlook?

[Garyc]

Hi, thanks for the quick reply mate. I tried the group calendar but it doesnt really meet our requirements. As a control, I opened an outlook account on a pc with no items in any folders (inbox, calendar, sent etc etc) this took 1 minute to open with a total folder size of 3 kilobytes. Opening another users calendar (which is totally empty) takes another minute. I would use the offline mode with timed syncronisation using a third party tool, but am i right in saying you cant syncronise or view other peoples calendars in off line mode. As a final note once everything is opened it is all quite responsive. It is the initial loading which seems to be the killer.

[ScalixSupport]

Hm. Very odd. It takes like five seconds on my network. I think we may have a network issue and need to look at the wire level. How fast can you transfer small and large files between the workstation and the server? Have you changed your MTU? Anything special with your setup?

Cheers,

Sascha.

[Chemosh667]

What is your disk and network I/O looking like? If you're swapping a lot, that'll definitely account for the pathetic performance. I do agree that it is sounding a little like a network issue. Time to do some performance testing for your machine in general. It may be some weird bottleneck like a router doing VLAN translation, or maybe some of the good ole' DNS shuffle...

And actually, make sure your CPU is up to the task. Semprons are generally not great for server duty, much like the case with celerons. Again, I/O testing/benchmarking is important for troubleshooting this kind of stuff.

Also, you may want to make sure and trim out some of the rediculous, and unnecessary daemons and such on your box. Windows isn't the only platform with this problem. I still prefer Linux for servers, but I've noticed that some of the big vendor distros tend to be pretty bloated unless you spend a lot of time at install time cleaning them up. Unless of course you feel you really need a sound daemon running on a server. It's nitpicky, but with a system running pretty light on hardware, it can help.

[Garyc]

Hi guys, thaks again for the pointers. server seems fine, 1gb ram free, transferring data seems fine - about 7MB/s for 100 Mbit n/w. The SWA interface for the heaviest email user opens in about 15 seconds from cold. It must be a DNS issue. Which im not to clued up in. When I set up the server, i used my isps pri and sec dns server ip addresses. But this would mean that the server cant resolve its own name ???. When I do a traceroute to another ip address on the LAN from the server, it just sits there for 30 seconds doing nothing, before completing the trace. This delay (DNS induced - using ip not name?) is what seems to hold the show up. When I monitor n/w traffic on the client machine while opening up MS Outlook, it just sits there and then a burst of data arrives, so that ties in with above observation. NS lookup resolves external ip addresses instantly, NSlookup to localhost returns "cant find localhost : NXDomain". Should I set up a DNS server on my LAN and use it as my primary DNS server to resolve the servers name??. Sorry if this sounds stupid, but im not to hot on DNS, and thanks again for your time guys, it is really appreciated.

[ScalixSupport]

Ah, well - it all makes sense now ;-)

Yes, you should definately set up your DNS!

To open up other users calendars, the server needs to to DNS lookups. This is what is taking so long (quick math, 30sec timeout *18 calendars * flux compensation = your wait).

Cheers,

Sascha.

[Garyc]

Hi Sascha, many thanks for all your help mate. Just one last question i forgot to ask. Is it ok to install and run a dns server on the scalix server?. Or is there a better way to do this, it only mentions that a DNS server must be running in the docs. (looks like losts of coffee and late nights this weekend to learn DNS :) )

Many thanks again Sascha

[ScalixSupport]

Running it locally with the Scalix server is fine. BIND is not very resource hungry.

Setting it up is not that bad, here is a good how-to : http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/DNS-HOWTO.html

Cheers,

Sascha.

[mephisto]

BIND is ok, but there are Nameservers that are easier to set up, e.g. dnsmasq - don't know if there is a RPM for it, though.

[Garyc]

Followed excellent guide at http://www.informit.com/articles/articl ... 1&seqNum=1
set up local dns server. nslookup hostname returns localhost ip of. Still taking ages to open up though. The only good news is I have managed to stretch another week, or best part of it to get this sorted. Thinking over this again, the web client opens up real fast, so what is different about the outlook client??. hmmm, just timed opening the largest client mailbox through Web Access over a *DSL VPN* tunnel, 30 seconds - FAST !!!! (12 seconds on the local LAN), considering the thousands of messages, appointments etc etc. On test machine, i have removed the virus killer, all unnecessary outlook add-ins etc, opening a completely empty account (ie no calendar entries, contacts, emails etc etc) on 100mbit lan, on the same switch as the server, takes almost 1 minute. Is there any way to disbable individual folders in outlook, so i can disable the calendar and test???., i really suspect theres something about the calendars / any known bugs with outlook or the connector ?!?!?

[kajayr]

You may have omitted to point your clients DNS lookup to your new DNS server. This is just as critical to your environment as having the server use its own DNS.

[Garyc]

Hi, many thanks to all who helped me with this problem. I got my DNS server working, and upgraded to version 10. And now it really rocks. Everyhing happens super fast. I disabled all unnecessary hardware at the bios level, and upped the memory to 2gb. so this "server" spec works fine for this size of users. Many thanks again to all who posted, and thanks to scalix for such a super product.