[imp] Speed Issues with IMP and high volume messages

[Andrew Morgan]

We haven't had any complaints here about opening "large" mailboxes, and
I'm sure our users would let us know.  :)

One of our sysadmins has over 1000 messages in his inbox, and he says it
opens pretty quick (under 10 seconds).

We're running the latest stable versions of Horde, IMP, Kronolith, and
Turba.

	Andy

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Iain Collins wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> First, some background information:
>
> We use HORDE & IMP here, and have done for quite some time. It's very slow
> opening large mailboxes, that is mail boxes with around 300 or more
> messages, or with several messages with large attachments.
>
> 300 may be considered a lot, but is not - IMO - /excessively/ large. Some of
> our users have 1000's of messages in their mail box and other solutions cope
> admirably.
>
> We have a cluster of IMAP servers (to go with the cluster of HORDE webmail
> servers, which are running FreeBSD) on a local LAN, and using other methods
> to login and retrieve mail (together with putting some time stamps in
> HORDE/IMP) have shown it's definitely HORDE/IMP and it's poor handling of
> these large mailboxes which is to blame. None of the servers in question are
> under heavy load.
>
> As examples of the scale of the delay:
>
> - For one user with 470 messages (average size is around 2-3K per message,
> there is one 6 MB attachment, and around 4 messages with 2 MB attachments,
> the rest are all typical size), it takes 40 to 50 seconds from clicking
> 'Login' to actually seeing a list of messages (and that was on a test server
> with no other load).
>
> - For another user, with around 3,000 messages (also with an average size of
> around 2K per message), the time between clicking 'Login' and being greeted
> win a message list is 4 minutes). Getting message headers should take just a
> few seconds (and indeed it does, with other IMAP clients).
>
> The same slowness is oddly also present when clicking 'log off'.
>
> Were not using the version latest version on the live cluster (because we'd
> need to rebrand it and customise it again), but I've tried the latest
> version on a test server and it's not any better, I've also tried using PHP
> Accelerator , but it doesn't seem to have helped either (it's a message
> handling issue, rather than a PHP being slow issue it seems).
>
> Users with smaller mailboxes (e.g. 50-100 message) log on very quickly with
> no issue.
>
> Finally, the questions:
>
> I'd like to know anyone able to use HORDE with large amounts of messages
> (500-1000) /without/ experiencing similar slowness?
>
> Is this just an unavoidable issue caused by the way HORDE handles messages
> (i.e. custom filtering rules/content filtering/etc - even though it doesn't
> matter if the effected customers have filtering on or off, the same slowness
> occurs)?
>
> Can any one suggest a work around for this to improve the speed?
>
> Your assistance and insight is greatly appreciated in advance.
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> Iain Collins, Systems Developer
> Email: iain.collins at uk.easynet.net
> Mobile: +44 (0) 7876 506 242
>
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