On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Moe Wibble wrote: > Hello everybody, > > I have come across bincimap recently and was instantly > attracted by its slim design. > > I actually liked it so much that I attempted to migrate our cyrus > imap-server to bincimap today. Unfornationally, after spending a couple > hours on converting the cyrus database to something maildir-like, > I was very disappointed by bincimaps poor performance on large folders. > > Is it really that slow or is it my fault? > > Opening a folder with ~12000 mails takes over 10min to complete and > bincimap pretty much clogs up the machine while doing so. > > Below a `top`-snapshot of two parallel imap-sessions, pid 4336 is > the one trying to open the large folder (12k messages), the other > is another session, opening a smaller folder at the same time. (1-2k messages) > > PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND > 4336 imapbi 17 0 9392 9392 2120 R 90.6 3.6 3:30 bincimapd > 4256 imapbi 14 0 48920 47M 2124 R 4.5 18.9 0:36 bincimapd > > For comparison: The same folder opens in ~15s when served by cyrus. > > I have used Mozilla 1.2.1 and mutt 1.2.5i for testing. > bincimap is running on an AMD Athlon XP 1600+, 256mb, linux 2.4.19. > All the maildirs are on a softraid-mirrored volume. > > The bincimap banner: > * OK Welcome to Binc IMAP v1.0.24 (c) Copyright 2002, 2003 Andreas Aardal Hanssen at > 2003-03-10T07:19:31+0100 > > Does anyone have a clue what could be causing the bad performance? > I can hardly believe bincimap takes so long to process a dir of 12k files. > > What am I missing? :)
Hey Moe. What filesystem do you have? If you are running ext2, for instance, I'm not surprised. For maildir to be fast, you need a fast filesystem, like reiserfs, which uses a B* tree to organise files. I personally have folders with several thousand mails in each (around 5k at the most), and I'm not waiting long :) Btw, reiserfs can also do tail packing to save space, but this impacts speed. Don't switch it on if speed is everything. Ketil Froyn [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ketil.froyn.name/
