Anyone using Zimbra dot com?

[Kurt Granroth]

On 12/16/09 10:08 PM, Dazed_75 wrote:
> My ISP (mediacom) apparently switched their email systems to zimbra and
> things have not worked right ever since.  Service has been intermittent
> and poor at best for a week now.  Zimbra.com claims to service 50
> million paid email accounts so I have a hard time believing this is so
> bad inherently.  I am thinking it is all poor planning and execution of
> the switchover and with no fallback plan.
>
> But I thought some of you might have experience with Zimbra that you
> could share.

I love (loved) Zimbra.  I actually switched from using a shared hosting 
environment to a virtual private server just so I could setup and use 
Zimbra for all of my mail and calendaring.  This was version 4.5 
"community edition" (i.e., the open source version).  I see that they 
are up to 6.0 now.

Alas, I had to jettison the entire installation.  Why?  Because Zimbra 
is a *pig* when it comes to resource usage.  I've never seen a single 
(non-VM) application use more than 1 gigabyte of memory just for 
itself... and that's just for the java parts.  That doesn't even count 
how much memory the related (but necessary) services like postfix, 
mysql, etc all use.  I had a VPS with 1GB and it just couldn't handle 
Zimbra.  I think they recommend 4GB and they're not kidding.

So... if you are having poor service, then I would guess that your 
provider just didn't allocate enough resources for it.  It works like a 
charm (very powerful; very robust) with enough horsepower behind it. 
But if you skimp, it'll feel like you are running on an old 286.

Kurt