[IMP] reducing imapd cruelty?

[Vasilios Hoffman]

Hello folks,

	A question for you all.  Other than using cyrus imapd, or
distributing services as the scalable webmail howto suggests, are there
any suggestions for reducing the number of imapds spawned and/or the disk
I/O created by IMP?

Currently, imapd is killing our setup -- almost every time a student here
loads up a new page in IMP, a new imap connection is made and their
INBOXes (which grow to enormous sizes, even with disk quotas) are
rescanned.  The I/O is tremendous, and cripples the machine during lunch
or other rush hours.

An earlier thread mentioned a cached proxy, and I understand that
persistent imap connections are a fundamental problem in a stateless
system, but there must be something else other folks are doing that we are
not.  In short, what is the best way to avoid all that unecessary (imho)
I/O?  I would hate to have the administration here move to a proprietary
solution (unless it really is for the best).

I appreciate all suggestions and I apologize if this question is clearly
answered somewhere else (I did look!).  I am looking into this on behalf
of the students here, to try to come up with a coherent suggestion to the
administration so that we can fix the problem.

Thanks,

-V