[imp] Persistent IMAP connections

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Egan <egan@sevenkings.net>:

> After searching the archives I see there has been some discussion of
> possibly using PHP4 sessions to create persistent IMAP connections.

Where did you see this? I don't recall any conversations along these lines.

> but their interface is not as attractive or complete as IMP.  It is
> interesting though, to see how they implemented their solution for
> persistent IMAP connections.  They basically create an IMAP client
> process on the server which has c-client bundled in, and it keeps the
> connection to the IMAP server alive, for some fixed length of time.
> 
> My testing indicates that they figured out some method of flushing out
> an abandoned child process and starting a new one, if the user closes
> the browser without logging out and then connects again.  That is what
> is most interesting to me about their software.

That sounds very server-dependant (ie, I don't think it'd work on windows at 
all), and ugly... I haven't had a chance to look at the code, though...

> If I get time, I might try hacking a similar solution into IMP using
> some of the ideas and/or code from the uv.es software (it's GPLed).

Any work in this direction would certainly be great. I'm a bit buried at the 
moment, but if it looks like this is feasible, I'd love to help out and 
facilitate in any way I can.

> Any insight from project veterans on this topic would be appreciated.
> I can already see that IMP will not scale well if it has to make a new
> IMAP connection for every HTTP request.

It does surprisingly well, actually, but persistant connections would certainly 
make things much better if done well.

-chuck

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chuck@horde.org>
Black and white and grey, all the shades of truth.