On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 13:23:19 -0800, Mark Edwards mark@antsclimbtree.com wrote:
On Feb 24, 2006, at 11:51 AM, Steve Block wrote:
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:09:47 -0800, Mark Edwards mark@antsclimbtree.com wrote:
Roundcube seems to have some difficulty dealing with large mailboxes (large meaning thousands of messages). It can manage indexing one of these, but if I try to actually show a message in a large mailbox, it basically hangs.
When this happens, the browser just sits there waiting for a reply, and I can do a 'top' on the server and watch the apache process just eat up memory until it finally dies.
It seems that Roundcube is digging through the mail and not releasing memory in some way, which becomes a problem as the mailbox size gets large. At least that's my theory.
Does anyone else observe this? This is with Apache 1.3.34, PHP 5.1.2, MySQL 4.1.18 and Cyrus 2.2.12, running on FreeBSD 4.11p14.
Thanks!
You are not alone. I have experienced the same issue with Cyrus 2.1.18 and a mailbox of approximately 37,000 messages (the debian- user mailing list). A recent upgrade to Cyrus 2.2.12 didn't seem to change anything. Browsing the folder is fairly snappy but viewing a message is all but impossible. I haven't taken the time to poke through the message retrieval code yet, but I imagine that this can be fixed considering how fast mutt or even Apple Mail can grab a message from the same folder.
Just for the record, I am running Debian 3.1, Mysql 4.1.11, Apache 2.0.54, php 4.3.10, and Cyrus 2.2.12.
Okay, so based on the responses thus far, I'd say there are two possibilities here.
- This is due to some peculiarity between Cyrus and Roundcube, and
people using other IMAP servers don't see this issue. One interesting thing is that Cyrus's imapd process also explodes in size during these events, along with the relevant httpd process.
I was going to ask if you were using mbox or Maildir (I use Maildir) but from your Squirrelmail response below it sounds like that's irrelevant.
- The people who see this issue have a wimpy enough server (mine is
quite wimpy - Pentium Pro 180Mhz with 128MB of RAM) that this situation is enough to bog down the server. Those who don't see it have a burly enough server to not be affected, even though its still occurring.
I'm running FreeBSD 6 on a 1.2Gig AMD / 512Megs RAM (PC133) so that's not a fair comparision.
In any case, its fairly obvious that, at least when used with Cyrus, Roundcube is chewing up resources in a way that it doesn't have to when viewing a particular message. Memory isn't getting released, or Roundcube is going through unnecessary steps to get to a particular message.
If I use Squirrelmail on the same server to access a message in the same box, and it is just as fast as any other box, or close to it. No memory explosion in the httpd process, no timeout. Roundcube shouldn't have to do any more work or suck up any more memory than Squirrelmail to perform the same action of retrieving a particular message's data.
Yeah, now I'm lost. Again my thoughts would have been about a big mbox file, or an IMAP server that couldn't handle that, but that does not compute if Squirrelmail is fast. After all, Roundcube just *displays* messages, it's not responsible for *reading* them...right? If caching was on then I'd think yes, but without, I assume it's no? Just typing aloud here..hth.
P
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