[imp] Ooomph for IMP

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Simon Matthews <simon@paxonet.com>:

> 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?

I use the mbox mailboxes with WU-IMAP and am happy.  The slowness I see
is from the IMAP/mailbox access and not from php.  But we're very happy
with the speed.  We're migrating the mail store to a NAS (NFS) and it 
makes it noticably slower than the local raid disk, but I think we're
going to live with the slowdown.  It adds about 1 to 1.5 seconds to 
each operation accessing the mailbox via NFS.

> 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.

We use UW-IMAP with mbox and the speed is fine, but the machine is also
a dual 600MHz (I think in an earlier post I said 450, it is really 600)
with a big, very fast raid-5 array on it and 512 MB of memory.

I've used php accelerators, but since the majority of our slowness is
IMAP access, they don't help as much as you would expect, except in some
special places (I actually added them to speed up Troll, not IMP).

-- 
Eric Rostetter
eric.rostetter@physics.utexas.edu

Hey Rocky!  Watch me pull a rabbit from my hat!