[imp] Re: IMP Slow?

[Lord Apollyon]

Quoting Alain Fauconnet <alain at ait.ac.th>:

> On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 10:48:57PM -0400, Mike DiChiappari wrote:
> > I am using the IMAP that comes with RedHat 9 (imap-20001a-18).  It
> > seems to work very well from various email clients.
> 
> That's  UW-IMAP.  I've  already explained to you why it may 'work very
> well from various email clients' and be slow from IMP,  but  I'll  try
> again:

> Regular e-mail clients (Outlook etc.) and IMAP-based  web  mails  have
> very different usage patterns of  the  IMAP  server.  Clients  keep  a
> single connection open. Web mails keep opening and closing sessions.

Also, Outhouse Depressed and many other IMAP clients cache local headers 
(and entire mailboxes), and so when it checks in, it's only looking to 
update the delta of the mailbox.  Whereas IMP, being stateless, needs to 
always re-process entire mailboxes.

As you've pointed out earlier, an imap-proxy can reduce the performance 
costs, but the real problem (also as you note) is the enumeration method of 
the various clients and the mailbox drivers/formats themselves.

mbox and maildir both have their respective issues...  What would be really 
great is a SQL-back-ended mailstore solution, but that's a big nut to crack 
with MTAs and MUA support being needed.
 
=R=