[imp] IMP Slow?

[Alain Fauconnet]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 10:18:03PM -0400, Mike DiChiappari wrote:
> Our IMP/Horde seems to be very slow.  I've looked through some of the
> posting here regarding performance and have tried a few things, but no
> success yet.
> 
> The problem is that accessing email via IMP is slow.  Access to IMAP
> mailboxes is fast through other email clients (Eudora, Outlook Express).  It
> is worse for accounts with large mailboxes (~100MB).  Login is slow and each
> page (inbox, message) is slow (5-10 seconds).
> 
> The machine is configured like this: RedHat9 with typical stuff, php
> 4.2.2-17, imap-2001a-18, horde 2.2.3, imp 3.2.1, and apache 2.0.40-21.  Oh,
> this is a relatively slow server (500MHz) and servers only about a dozen
> email accounts.

What IMAP server are you using? IMP, like almost  any  IMAP-based  web
mail, opens and closes IMAP sessions quite often. With  UW-IMAP,  this
means  *a  lot* of disk I/O if you have large mailboxes. That might be
your bottleneck.

In  my  past  experience  with  very  busy  mail  servers (e.g. 80,000
mailboxes  on  a  single  Sun  E420 server), switching from UW-IMAP to
Courier  or  another  Maildir  format  IMAP  server  made   a   *huge*
difference.

Some  people  have  had  luck  with  IMAP  proxies that cache sessions
(http://www.horde.org/imapproxy/).  I don't like this kind of approach
much.

Greets,
_Alain_