The internet made it pretty clear that it would not be fun to make this work. So we entered the world of pain that is upgrading BIOS firmware. The two oldest machines were running BIOS 2.0, and to support E5-26xx v2 CPUs, we needed at least 3.0. It was a success, so we went ahead and ordered the remaining 10. We started by purchasing two CPUs and upgrading a single machine to see how it went. So we researched CPU upgrade options, and settled on the E5-2630 v2 - a slightly less powerful CPU than the v3 with only 6 cores (so 24 threads total), but still a good improvement and compatible with the older X9DRD-7LN4F motherboards. Compared to our newer hosts with E5-2630 v3 CPUs having 8 cores and hyperthreading for 32 threads, the difference in performance was striking. These CPUs only have 4 cores each and no hyperthreading, giving a total 8 threads of execution. We had purchased 6 machines with E5-2609 CPUs. IO is still vitally important, but the increasing CPU usage meant that for the first time some of our machines had insufficient CPU to saturate their IO capacity. Unbalanced machinesįor years the limiting factor on our servers has been IO performance. Optimising this is a goal for another day. In Cyrus this is quite expensive, and we have seen processes running for hundreds of seconds processing searches for a couple of hundred messages at once.

Instead of checking for FolderName/UIDVALIDITY/UID which is very cheap, it does a search by Message-ID.

Meaning that the CPUs do more encryption workĪs for clients - we recently discovered that Apple's clients use messages to create synthetic events in their calendar, and then poll the server to make sure that the messages still exist. We've switched to using LUKS for SSDs as well as the spool and search partitions, Due to issues with boot reliability when the SSDs have the built-in encryption enabled.We have updated the web interface to call LIST more often We've upgraded the Xapian search engine and added a few new features to it over.Into Cyrus, increasing load on backend servers and decreasing load on the database We didn't have a calendar before, and we moved contacts from the database We have added CalDAV and CardDAV support to our IMAP servers as part of the Cyrus.

Sometimes there are also outside forces involved. Creeping CPU loadĪs we add new features to our service, the profile of server usage changes. This is a behind the scenes look at the ongoing hardware refreshing that we periodically do to keep our servers running well. For once we're not writing about anything user visible at all.

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