Re: SquirrelMail slow, VERY slow

["nathan r. hruby" <nhruby uga edu>]

On Wed, 25 May 2005, Doug Stewart wrote:

> Forgot to mention that part: the IMAP server is indeed wu-imapd, but it's 
> running on a Solaris 8 box.  As of right now, that's non-negotiable.  It may 
> be changeable in the future.

What version wu-imap?  'Kinda Sun gear?  Methinks you may just be hitting
the limits of mbox (unless, of course, you're using a Sparc10).  What are
the INBOX sizes of the most troublesome users?  er.. well, the one's who
have the longest wait, I'm sure the most troublesome users have a INBOX
size of zero ;)

Sadly, there's not a whole hell of a lot you *can* do if your IMAP server
is slow.  What's worse is that Webmail will put more of a strain on your
IMAP servers than normal fat clients, so if you;re marginal now, webmail
will push you easily over the edge.

One thing that might help is running a IMAP proxy (like perdition) on the
Webmail server and make SM to talk to it.  The proxy then talks to the
real IMAP server and does some connection caching, so you don't have the
network setup/teardown issues you do now.

IIRC, uw-imap does support mbx as well as mbox format mailboxes, and mbx
has just enough indexing to possibly keep you running until such time as
you can do some more invasive work on the mailstore.  This might be worth
looking into (though you'll need to convert the mailboxes I'm sure.)

HTH,

-n

--
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nathan hruby <nhruby uga edu>
uga enterprise information technology services
production systems support
metaphysically wrinkle-free
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