IMAP vs Pop3

Tom Mitchell mitch48 at sbcglobal.net
Mon Dec 29 04:39:22 UTC 2003


On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> > From: Colin Charles [mailto:linux at bytebot.net]
> > 
> > 1 hour for POP3 based e-mail message downloads? Is your link 
> > really slow
> > or something? Even on dialup, and the sheer amount of e-mails I get, I
> > POP all my mail and it doesn't take that long (of course, I'm not
> > usually on dialup, but getting in like 4-5megs of mail per POP for all
> > different accounts doesn't take longer than 15 minutes? Probably
> > less...)
> 
> 10BaseT connections.. It's weird to me too..
> 
> Any suggestions on troubleshooting?

Use some tools: tethereal, traceroute  and strace.

First Snoop on the ethernet and see what packets are being
passed. It may be as simple as DNS lookups timing out.  A local
caching name server can help bunches if it is DNS.  

Traceroute can help you see if the path to and from are sane.
Also "ping -R" can tell you if routes are flopping hither and
yon. Since they often do key on the round trip packet time as
much as the hops/paths.

Next "strace -f"  the process.  With the right flags you can see
time stamps on the system calls and responses.  Look for pairs
that take 'too' long.

It may be usefull to setup "fetchmail" so it collects your mail
and delivers to you on the localhost.  Watch it in verbose mode.

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l
	mitch48 -a*t- yahoo-dot-com





More information about the fedora-list mailing list