[imp] Ooomph for IMP

[Walter R. Moore]

We use UW-IMAP, and our speed seems to be fine all-around. We have 
around 4000 users, of which perhaps 500 are "power" users. With the 
exception of a small session problem (see my previous email), everyone 
loves IMP!

Our web server for IMP is a dual-purpose Postgres and IMP server, a 
pentium III 866 with 512mb ram running Redhat 7.2, and it is usually 
 >90% idle.

Our mail server is a Sun 220R with one cpu and a gig of memory. We have 
our mail spool on a hardware mirror, and this does get bogged down in IO 
now and then, but IMAP itself is very responsive. I suggest you look at 
your IO load on the mail server to explain your slow times. Also, if you 
still use IMP 2.x, I did note that a small % of your database hits for 
preferences and session would be extremely slow.

-Walter Moore
  Eckerd College

Simon Matthews wrote:
> Can I ask if those who are happy with IMP's speed are using Maildir 
> mailboxes and those who feel it is too slow are using "Unix style" 
> mailbox files?
> 
> My personal opinion is that the speed to open up the inbox the first 
> time is acceptable, but the speed to open an email or go back to the 
> inbox is rather poor. We use UW-IMAP. Our IMAP server is on another 
> machine, but it is rather underpowered.
> 
> Simon
> 
> At 03:34 PM 4/25/02 +0100, Henry Blackman wrote:
> 
>> Indeed, I didn't mention I use PHP accelerator.  I find, on our IMP
>> webserver, it doesn't make a dramatic difference, but it is noticable
>> (just).  I do find it very useful on our corporate Intranet; it makes a
>> difference of about 800%.  Great stuff.
>>
>> Henry
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Edward Wildgoose" <Edward.Wildgoose@FRMHedge.com>
>>
>>
>> No one is mentioning PHP accelerators?  How many are using something like
>> PHP Accelerator?
>>
>> I find that it makes quite a big difference with responsiveness for my 
>> Nuke
>> & IMP site, but I don't have enough users to measure the performance
>> increase.  Many users using PHP Accelerator or Zend Accelerator (or 
>> any of
>> the other fine products!) find it gives a pretty good speedup
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Ramon Kagan [mailto:rkagan@YorkU.CA]
>>
>> HI,
>>
>> I've been able to run 400 users on a PIII 500 with 256 Mb of RAM will
>> response times of 5 sec or less.  The machine was running imap, 
>> junkfilter
>> and otherwise.
>>
>> As for our official setup.  We have 40000 users, 10000 logins per day,
>> inboxes up to 900 MB running on 3 x Dual PIII866 with 1.5 GB memory.  
>> This
>> will be increased by adding two Dual PIII 1.3 GHz with 2 GB in the near
>> future, since our user base will increase to 50000 and logins should
>> increase to 15000.  In all of this we still maintain an average response
>> time of less than 4.5 sec and usually in the 3.5 to 3.8 range.  Overall
>> our servers are completing between 500000 and 800000 requests per day.
>>
>> I would look at your usage and base that on my two setups above.  Figure
>> out where you fit in this category to determine your needs.
>>
>> Ramon Kagan
>> York University, Computing and Network Services
>> Unix Team -  Intermediate System Administrator
>> (416)736-2100 #20263
>> rkagan@yorku.ca
>>
>> On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Kevin Myers wrote:
>>
>> > On Thu, 25 Apr 2002 08:14:23 -0400 (EDT), Ramon wrote:
>> >
>> > >How many users? How many logins per day?  How big are the mailboxes?
>> >
>> > Mmm. Well let's say 15 users, with an average inbox size of 5Mb, in 
>> mbox
>> > format, and 10 other folders, each holding 5Mb, 10 users logging in 
>> in the
>> > morning and checking their mail every 5 minutes throughout the day, the
>> > other 5 users only logging in occasionally.
>> >
>> >


-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
Walter R. Moore --  System Administrator, Eckerd College
moorewr@eckerd.edu --  http://home.eckerd.edu/~moorewr

"It was glorious to see -- if your heart were iron,
And you could keep from grieving at all the pain" - The Iliad (13.355)