Hi,
>
> We run qpopper 3.0.2 on an AIX unix box. As most users choose
> to keep mails on server, hence it becomes quite slow when plenty
> users are reading their mail at the same time (though i've
> placed the .pop files directory separate from their /var/spool/mail
> mailboxes).
> Now since the newest version of AIX OS has this feature of
> using part of the RAM as disk (using a command called mkramdisk)
> , i wonder will it improve things much ( i did a simple test
> on a test machine for 1 mailbox, but the difference is not significant)
> for qpopper. Could it be that the reading of the mail from /var/spool/mail
> to create the .pop files is also the bottleneck.
I don't know specifically about AIX but in our experience the bottlenecks
are: a) in mail handling generally - the type of mail spool.
Your case of having all mailboxes in the one directory means that
various programs (including qpopper) have to search sequentially
through a very large index for every i/o operation
b) for qpopper and similar pop3 servers - having to copy the user's
mailbox to and from the temp file (much worse if they are leaving
mail on the server as has been discussed on this list before).
The solutions which have improved mail server performance dramatically
for us were to use the ~user/Mailbox format for mail spools and installing
qpopper 4.0.3 to use server mode (although not for shell users!).
In answer to your question, I personally doubt that much performance
would be improved by using the ram disk in that way - just having more
ram would be just as beneficial, imho...
To me it also seems a somewhat risky idea. Admittedly you are likely to
get corrupted mail spools if the server fails/dies under normal circumstances
- but if using the ram disk those mail spools will just disappear in the
event of a catastrophic failure.
'Hope this helps,
Peter Vaskess
Netlink Connect, Australia
