Last night we completed a “behind the scenes” project for webmail that will help us improve the scalability of our webmail server farm, improve our ability to measure the performance of our applications, and improve the overall speed up our applications. I started this project way back February and I previewed what we were doing in this post. By utilizing a piece of open source software called “Pound” we will be able to accomplish all of the goals listed above.
The primary reason for starting this project was our need to differentiate static web pages from dynamic web pages and send them to different clusters depending on the type of traffic. This would allow us to better cache the static content and get a better measurement on how well the dynamic pages are performing. We also wanted an easier way to manage all of our SSL certificates. Bill’s team (Tony and Korey) created a set of web pages that our support team can use to install and configure new SSL certificates. Mike also chipped in any necessary code changes that were need for webmail. And finally, Vinny helped me re-configure the control panel application for the new cluster of static servers.
I appreciate everyone’s help in making this project a complete success.
