[halflife78]

For all of the people with a large amount of BB users in your company, what is the maximum number of users you have per server and the type of server? I am doing research now because I am getting closer to 500 users and it is beginning to take quite awhile to cycle to refreshes on everyone.

I am running Xeon 2.4GHz box with 2gigs of RAM right now, just ordered 2 more gigs to put in the box but I am getting ready to try and budget a second box for next year.

Thanks,

Steven

[Ugg]

I'd start with your own server - have a look at memory, CPU and disk usage and see what it's running out of. Also - presumably it's using a remote SQL Server database?

I don't have access to a box of that size right now, but performance does seem to vary based on how much the users use their devices and what for. For example, if people spend all their time sending and viewing attachments and that's done on the same server it'll have a significant impact.

[mahoward]

Other than what is possible on a particular hardware config, remember DR scenarios and other factors. I had 1300 users on one box but when it crashed, it took forever to come back up. Also think about the time it would take to move all those user accounts if the box died, on avg one account per minute.

RIM also wants you to run debug level logging for crash information, these logs get huge after 500 users. Harder to parse, harder to zip & upload. The less number of users per box, the less number of people an issue on that box affects. I limit my boxes to 750 users or less for these reasons, though the hardware could support much more.

[x14]

I have 700+ users and my problem is that I'm running out of memory. I'm at 3.5GB. My CPU can handle more but I need more memory. My next step is to upgrade to Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and go up to 8GB of RAM.

[mahoward]

Domino is only able to handle 2GB of ram per partition on Win32, you may not see much improvement.

[Highfall]

x14,

Does BES handle PAE? On a 32 bit platform you would be limited to 4 Gigs without that ability. If you know something I do not, let me know as I was wondering if I could go above 4Gigs with the BES... Thanks!

[greg2step]

Depends first on if you are running SQL or MSDE - MSDE is rated at about 500 users, although we had up to 620 on our 3.6 servers about a year ago (now retired)

We now have SQL server, and have a pair of 4.12 servers at 1300 each and they run pretty solid. However we are about to add 2 new servers to the DB and spread out that load. I am not sure i want to put many more users on these servers.

[MarkF]

We just went from 9 BES instances running v3.6.7, with # of users ranging from 400 to over 700. Everything worked but we had all the services restarting automatically every night to clean up the hnug MAPI threads.

Now we're at v4.1.2 on DL385 G2 servers, 4 BES, have roughly 1300 users on each. Email delivery performance has been great but we're still dealing with massive syncing problems ever since the upgrade to 4.1.2.

[FlyerNut]

I've been told by RIM support that you should only have up to 500 users on a server? We're running GroupWise, but they said it wasn't platform specific. I just started admin of our BES, so I'm curious if this is true?

Their install pdf has hardware requirements for 500, 1000, and so on users, so that makes it even more murky for me to understand.

[bbgirl71]

For GW you can only have 500.

[moorken]

We run on a Xeon 2,8Ghz 1536MB RAM but we only have 50 users, i don't think this will help you mutch
We will move to VMWare server soon, does somebody have an idea what the inpact or extra requirements are?
I believe that its not working with version 4.0 or lower