Re: [Phpgroupware-users] Scalability.

[Alex Borges (lex)]

Honking my own horn here but well...

Ive a close to 600 users install. You have to consider a bunch of stuff
before rolling this kind of thing out:

1.- Will your server be dedicated to phpgw? (this means, only
apache+phpgw in your server, database and mail apps in another, or are
you putting it all together)

2.- What apps will you be using in phpgw and how (Calendar+extensive use
of groups is a very database intensive application). Or will it be more
of a Addressbook+calendar+mail+todo kind of thing.

3.- Are you shure you know how to make an apache scale?

4.- BEWARE: php-imap DOES NOT SCALE. Youll need a substantial ammount of
tweaking to make the whole thing work.

5.- That said, after it all stabilizes, this deployment works like a
whistle. It did take me about 4-5 months to discover all the niceties in
an apache+pgsql install.

6.- Apache+php in PPC has issues in the php4 session code. Be shure to
have a test server (PPC) and test it out before rolling out.

7.- I tested in 100 users before going in for the full rollout (which is
unfinished still -it will have 1000+ users). I advise you to do the
same. Imap servers dont necesarily scale for webmail solutions the same
as fat client solutions (where you have mozilla or ol in the client
side). You have to make shure your imap will work with a webmail right
first (typical example is courier, which scales great but comes with a
maxperip limit of 4 connections in the default config. You keep that,
and no matter how good courier is, your webserver cannot connect more
than 4 users at the same time. So, you just need to change this in
imap.conf -discovering it is a bit more painfull than just explaining
it).


8.- Talk to me, ive been looking for ppl with deployments of this size,
ill be glad to help you out cause i know youll probably find good
solutions for problems i didnt solve well. Two heads think better than
one. Ill help out, dont worry, its been done and its sort of dead easy
(at least the second time). Users will want to murder you at first, but
theyll calm down sooner or later....etc. Dont panic, move forward.


Lex
El mié, 27-11-2002 a las 09:26, Michael Solberg escribió:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm trying to roll out a groupware solution for about 600 clients in my
> department.  phpGroupWare looks like an excellent solution, but I'm a
> little worried about scalability.  I only have the following hardware:
> 
> 2 x 1GHz 512MB RAM Mac G4 webserver running OS X and apache
> 233Mhz 128MB RAM Dell mysql server running Slackware 8.1
> 
> Is anyone else supporting a kinda big install of phpGroupWare?  Better
> yet, is anyone using this in the enterprise setting?
> 
> We're going to just start out using the calendar and addressbook and
> then we'll add apps as the users get used to the environment.  (Sooner
> or later we'll get a new database server as well).
> 
> Mike.
> 
> 
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-- 
Alex (Lex) Borges
Software Engineer
Step One Group
www.sogrp.com