Hi Stan,
I'm sorry that my not clarifying the background of this unsettled you somewhat.
I'm a PhD student at the University of Antwerp http://win.ua.ac.be/content/staff and like many of my colleagues, I was dissatisfied with the webmail interface that the ICT would provide: It's old, it's buggy, and it seems unmaintained. Frustrating, but oh well, I guess that's how it goes sometimes. Anyway, some friends and I decided to have a look into free webmail solutions for us to use at the Computer Science department, and to play around with them a bit to see what's actually possible. This is purely a spare-time activity really, but the success in setting up RoundCube and getting a nice and modern webmail interface was quite satisfactory.
Of course I don't demand official support for this in any way, but because of our performance problems I thought I'd just drop a line to the users' mailing list. Sorry if you felt startled by this. It's cool if you decide to ignore these mails of course, I mean, that's what people do with 99% of their mailing lists I guess. Anyway, thanks for your help so far.
You are posting here with a gmail address instead of your university address.
This is b/c the UA email doesn't perform well in some areas -- incredibly long delivery delays, 500MB mailbox limit, other funny things.
Cheers, Nico
On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 4:58 PM, Stan Hoeppner stan@hardwarefreak.com wrote:
Nico, do you have permission/authorization to connect this RC server to the campus Exchange server? You are posting here with a gmail address instead of your university address. This leads me to believe you are not acting in an official capacity.
Furthermore, if you are not a member of the university IT staff, it is possible that network layer (router/qos) roadblocks are the reason for the abysmal performance, and you will never know this. If _we_ are to help you make this RC server function properly, we require accurate answers to our questions. If you cannot provide that accurate information, we won't be able to fully help you.
Keep in mind none of us wants to assist a rogue student in doing something against university policy or without proper permission. Hacking is a personal endeavor, not one that should involve IT professionals around the world who are spending their valuable time assisting you in something that may very well be illegal in your jurisdiction.
Are you authorized to be doing this? If so, get the information on the Exchange server, and interface with its admin staff to optimize your RC performance.
-- Stan
Nico Schlömer put forth on 9/14/2010 2:05 PM:
PING imap.ua.ac.be (143.169.245.58): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 143.169.245.58: icmp_seq=1 ttl=124 time=2.053 ms
traceroute to imap.ua.ac.be (143.169.245.58), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 pcfw1 (143.129.75.14) 0.655 ms 0.695 ms 0.472 ms 4 143.169.251.100 (143.169.251.100) 1.725 ms 1.471 ms 1.217 ms
Both machines are on the same friggin campus network Nico. I'm very glad now I asked these questions. I'm probably not the only one who thought this RC server was fairly remote to the IMAP server...
- Do you have imapproxy installed on the RC server?
Never heard of that.
See my other post.
- What web server are you using?
- What version of PHP?
- What version of FreeBSD?
All good.
- What are the hardware specs (CPU speed/mem size) of both the RC
server and the IMAP server?
RC server:
- 4 cores,
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz (1999.78-MHz K8-class CPU)
- 8 GB mem
No apparent problems here.
I'd like to benchmark PHP applications in general, or have some sort of general web application benchmark anyway. Suggestions?
None from me. Your PHP implementation isn't the problem here.
I have no idea about the hardware specs of the IMAP server.
Too bad the Exchange server IMAP string below doesn't tell us. ;)
- What IMAP server daemon/version is running on the IMAP server?
It must be one of those Microsoft Server installations -- no idea what version though. Remote benchmark possible?
Now that I have the server IP, I can answer my own question. Look at the very last line below. It's the Exchange 2003 IMAP connector. So you were indeed correct about the IMAP server being Microsoft. FWIW, the connection establishment time from Missouri, USA is instantaneous, even though the latency is in the 150-200ms range.
[03:27:35][stan@greer]~$ openssl s_client -connect 143.169.245.58:993
CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 /C=BE/O=Cybertrust/OU=Educational CA/CN=Cybertrust Educational CA <snip><snip><snip> 0 s:/C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Antwerp/O=Universiteit Antwerpen/OU=ICT/CN=webmail.ua.ac.be
<snip><snip><snip>
- OK Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 IMAP4rev1 server version 6.5.7638.1
(xmailf3.ad.ua.ac.be) ready.
List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/users/ BT/500a1e2e
List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/users/ BT/9b404e9e