On Feb 24, 2006, at 1:35 PM, phil wrote:
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 13:23:19 -0800, Mark Edwards
mark@antsclimbtree.com wrote: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.
Cyrus doesn't use either. Its has its own proprietary mailbox
format, which generally performs super great in my experience. I've
never had any performance issues from Cyrus.
All other clients I try don't have any problems retrieving a single
message from a large mailbox, and the operation that I could see
causing an issue, namely forming the index, is plenty fast with
Roundcube.
- 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.
But that could point to why you aren't bogging down in the same way I
am. It could be you are having the same issue, you just aren't
seeing it. Maybe if you tried a mailbox with 80,000 messages you
would. Not that I recommend trying that. ;-)
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.
Well, in any case, why is doing anything other than saying, "give me
this particular message data" and then displaying it?