David Dooling wrote:
>I would guess mailutil is part of the uw-imapd distribution too. As >for maildir, I don't think uw-imapd supports it (I could be wrong). > > With patches >But if speed is your concern, mbx might be better anyway. Going from >mbox to maildir is going from a single large file to lots of small >files. mbx is indexed, so only one file needs to be opened and it can >seek quickly to each message. > >Ultimately, though, I think your problem is uw-imapd. Since it does >not support a daemon mode (it is written to only get started by >inetd), coupling it with SquirrelMail, which does not support >persistant connections, is a bad idea. I know, we did it. The >problem is that every time you do anything in SquirrelMail, a new >connection to the IMAP server is established. With uw-imapd, this >means inetd gets a connection, does its work, then spawns uw-imapd, >which then has to open the mailbox (whatever format), read it, and >report back. This has to be done for every click. Now, if you have a >good bit of RAM on the server, you benefit from caching of the >uw-imapd and mailboxes in memory that the OS does, but if you have a >significant number of users with large mailboxes, it only goes so far >(and doesn't really solve the problem anyway). One other problem is >that mbox format can caused significant fragmentation on ext3 >filesystems. > >Fortunately, there are several things you can do to improve the performance. > >1. Convert from mbox to mbx > >2. Use a persistant client, e.g., Mozilla Thunderbird > >3. Use SquirrelMail with an imap proxy daemon (http://www.imapproxy.org/) > >4. Use an imap _daemon_ > >If you end up doing #4, I would recommend Cyrus. The problem with it >is that is uses its own storage format. The benefit is that it uses >its own storage format. It's storage format allows mailboxes to >contain messages and other mailboxes, each message is in its own file, >and each mailbox maintains its messages' headers and state in a couple >database files (something like BerkeleyDB, but specific to Cyrus). >That last item really speeds up index displays, sorting, and >searching. > > > #4 is probably best, but out of scope at the moment. #1 so far has decreased the folder display problem in SM from ~40 seconds to 3 #3 seems to help as well. The very fist time is still slow 8-10 seconds, but after that it speeds up significantly 1-2 seconds/pper page load. View/Reply to messages are seeming much faster too. I am lost in a jungle of formats+IMAP servers. UW-IMAP doesn't support Maildir except with a patch (or several from what I've read.) Which puts it just as out of scope as the new server idea. Cyrus has its own format. Others use Maildir. I guess the rule-of-thumb is to use the folder format best suited to your particular IMAP server. The webmail client talks over the IMAP protocol, so making the IMAP server internally faster helps. The webmail clients are stateless and need to be helped by a better server (Cyrus) or a proxy (imapproxy). What I did, for those who may be interested is : wget'edl pine4/64 from www.washington.edu/pine/getpine/unix.html I built that according to instructions. Then I copied bin/mailutil to /usr/local/bin. As the user (me) I did : [ logged out of Thnderbird ] mailutil copy mbox '#driver.mbx/INBOX' [ griped about some Junk/NotJunk tags put there by Thunderbird] mv mbox saved_mbox [Logged back in in Thunderbird to check to see if it still worked. Startup was a tad slower, but it worked] Logged in with SquirellMail. Slow startup time, but eventually noticed a 80% speedup in page loads. Got imapproxy 1.2.4 from www.imapproxy.org unpacked and configure-make-make install (read the README for a few other make install-* optiions you may need. Edited /etc/imapproxy.conf and set the server to localhost and the listen port to something other than 143 (which is what UW-IMAP is listening on.) Started the server (service imapproxy start) Confuugured SM to use that same port. [SM]/config/config.pl => Server Settings => Update IMAP Settings => IMAP Port. Logged back into SM. Noticed first time was slow, but subsequent times were much faster. 1-2 seconds. Ed >dd >-- >David Dooling > >_______________________________________________ >CWE-LUG mailing list >[email protected] >http://www.cwelug.org/ >http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ >http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/ > > -- Ed Howland WDT Solutions, LLC. [EMAIL PROTECTED] (314) 962-0766 _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
