[imp] Slowness with big mailboxes

[Chip Mefford]

On 2001.10.02 05:47 Alex Leverington wrote:
> 
> I have found that 'chmod +t' the your mail direcotry in
> spool *greatly* 
> improves speed (ex: chmod +t /var/spool/mail)
> 
> I did this and it improved performance drastically. I'm
> not sure what it does 
> but I read it on a post once. I'm guess it sets some type
> of access priority or 
> does read-ahead caching or something. Nonetheless, it
> worked for me.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Alex Leverington

I'm confused, 
Some of the older documentation I have says the t switch
sets the "sticky" bit, other docs state that the t switch
saves the program text on swap device. 

I expect it is the latter operation that is at play
here, but I don't see why this would be a great idea
for mail? 

what exactly does the t switch do? If /var/spool/mail
is set to save text on swap, and swap is smaller
than a users mailbox, which is at least conceivable,
users being what they are, wouldn't that turn into a
real issue? 


 
> 
> Quoting Peter Farrow <PeterF@3d-computers.co.uk>:
> 
> > Dear Paul,
> > 
> > I have set imp up on a Red Hat Linux machine (7.0 and
> 7.1) and found the
> > following information:
> > 
> > On Red Hat 7.0 running on a single PIII 650 machine with
> 256 Megs of RAM
> > takes a long time (>1 Min)to open a mailbox with 3000 or
> so messages in it,
> > 
> > 
> > On Red Hat 7.1 running on a Dual Celeron 366 machine
> with 512Megs RAM it
> > takes around 10 seconds to do the same thing.
> > 
> > So its either: Red Hat 7.1, RAM or twin CPUs that makes
> the difference for
> > me.
> > 
> > Notably, when connecting  to a Micro$oft Exchange server
> it takes about 10x
> > as long than connecting to a real mail server running
> Solaris on an E4000
> > machine, even when the Mailboxes are of comparable
> complexity.
> > 
> > I know this isn't much help, but it gives you somewhere
> to start!  An Imap
> > proxy moves the delay downstream and may not help as
> much as you need.
> > 
> > Regards
> > 
> > Peter Farrow 
> > peterf@3d-computers.co.uk
> > Technical Director
> > 3D computer Systems
> > 
> > www.3d-computers.co.uk
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Paul Fielding [mailto:paul@mainland.ca]
> > Sent: 01 October 2001 21:07
> > To: imp@lists.horde.org
> > Subject: Re: [imp] Slowness with big mailboxes
> > 
> > 
> > Quoting Jon Parise <jon@horde.org>:
> > 
> > > There's really no way around it at the moment.  You
> might try
> > > looking at an IMAP proxy, such as Perdition:
> > 
> > But I guess my question is, no way around what?
> > 
> > It seems to me that it isn't just an 'accepted problem'.
>  I'm experiencing
> > a
> > 
> > slow down on big mailboxes, other people aren't. 
> Obviously this means that
> > 
> > there should be something I can change in my system that
> should remedy the 
> > situation.  Perhaps an OS issue, perhaps an IMP issue,
> perhaps my hardware 
> > simply isn't beefy enough and I need to upgrade it.
> (Just how much
> > horsepower 
> > does IMP need to connect to a mailserver and server out
> big mailboxes
> > quickly? 
> > Mine's a Pentium class box).
> > 
> > <shrug>  I'm just trying to understand what the problem
> actually is...
> > 
> > regards,
> > 
> > Paul
> > 
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> 
> 
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