Re: performance optimzations

> > Most clients will be interested in say the last 7 days worth of data? 
> > Great.. Start out with 4GB ram on a good Dual CPU -- Opterons seem to
> > work quite well -- and make sure the motherboard can hold double that in
> > memory for an upgrade sometime next year when you've become popular.
> 
> Unfortunately, the hardware available is pretty much fixed in regards to
> the system.  I can play around with the raid configurations and have
> some limited choice in regards to the raid controller and number of
> drivers but that's about all in terms of hardware.    

Good luck then. Unless the configuration takes into account incremental
additions in ram and disk, sustained growth could get very expensive. I
guess that depends on the business plan expectations.

This just puts more emphasis to offload everything you can onto machines
that can multiply.

> The current file system holding the user and email information indicates
> the current data has about 64GB (70K accounts, I'm not sure how many are
> active but 50% might be good guess).  This seems to be somewhat of a
> steady state however.

35k clients checking their mail daily isn't so bad. Around 10 pages per
second peak load?