Charlie Hazlett wrote:
I do not empty my spam folder daily and in no time at all it can contain over 1000 messages......give it a week and there might be over 10,000.
I have been online with the same email addresses for a dozen years and the spam tends to build up.
On 1/24/2008, "bb" bb@0brg.net wrote:
chasd wrote:
Playing with RoundCube a bit more, as a work around you could delete the entire mailbox from the "Folders" area of "Personal Settings" and then create a new folder of the same name.
Or just click the "Select: All" link and then delete 40 messages (or w/e your messages/page limit is) at a time. Sure, it's not perfect, but it works alright if your mailbox isn't tooooo huge (I am assuming you don't want to empty a 10K+ box every day that is not called "Junk" or "Trash" :P).
Hmm, this got me interested; how does roundcube handle huge mailboxes anyway? So I tried;
$ for ((i=0;i<100000;i++)); do for> echo "spam $i" | mail -s "spam $i" $USER for> done
Even though this stopped after the ulimit -u was reached (it sent ~2k messages in total) it gives a pretty good impression of how roundcube handles it... not very well.
At first, I set my user preferences to allow message windows with 100K messages but because of the hard 200 limit in the config, I only saw 200 messages. At least I saw them.. once I also modified that value I saw nothing anymore. The roundcube error logs gave:
[25-Jan-2008 00:21:34] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2049 bytes) in /a/boao/www/webmail/roundcubemail-0.1-rc2/program/lib/imap.inc on line 133
The HTTP response body was empty, status 200. Changing back all the values, deleting all messages with thunderbird (which worked very smoothly, btw), restarting the webserver; nothing mattered. It kept saying that in the logs. To eventually get it to work again I had to empty the trash with thunderbird and "compact" all the folders.
Anyway, not that this is a very likely situation.. It's still quite interesting to see that once it's too full, it's too full and you're doomed if you don't have other means to access your INBOX :)
Greetings, b^4 _______________________________________________ List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/users/
[25-Jan-2008 00:21:34] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of
8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2049 bytes) in /a/boao/www/webmail/roundcubemail-0.1-rc2/program/lib/imap.inc on
line 133
The HTTP response body was empty, status 200. Changing back all the values, deleting all messages with thunderbird (which worked very smoothly, btw)
A mailbox with a large number of messages takes a lot of memory to
display and handle. Thunderbird can simply request more memory from
your computer. RoundCube depends on the memory on the server, and how
much of that the server admin has allowed PHP and the web server to
get. Most admins keep a tight reign on the PHP memory allocation
because of security issues and the possibility of a runaway process
causing a type of Denial Of Service to other users. If you crash your
computer because T-Bird demands too much memory, it only impacts you.
If your requests on the server through RoundCube cause the server to
crash, that impacts many more users.
restarting the webserver; nothing mattered. It kept saying that in the logs. To eventually get it to work again I had to empty the trash with thunderbird and "compact" all the folders.
Using IMAP to mark messages as deleted doesn't actually delete the
message. That allows the "undelete" to happen, and also take very
little time to write just a few bytes of data to mark the message. It
is a safeguard for click-happy users, and a performance comprimise.
This isn't a RoundCube thing, it is an IMAP thing. When you "compact"
or "expunge" a mailbox, that causes the IMAP server to pick through
the entire mailbox a message at a time, transferring only the "good"
messages to a temp file, and then overwriting the mailbox file with
the temp file when it is done. This takes a long time. There is a
setting in T-Bird to control when this happens - there is a data
savings size threshold that when exceeded makes a delete trigger an
expunge.
Anyway, not that this is a very likely situation.. It's still quite interesting to see that once it's too full, it's too full and you're doomed if you don't have other means to access your INBOX :)
Did you try my suggestion of deleting the entire folder from the
"Folders" tab of "Personal Settings" ? I don't keep that many
messages in a mailbox for me to test.
Charles Dostale System Admin - Silver Oaks Communications http://www.silveroaks.com/ 824 17th Street, Moline IL 61265
List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/users/
On 25-Jan-2008, at 07:22, chasd wrote:
A mailbox with a large number of messages takes a lot of memory to display and handle. Thunderbird can simply request more memory from your computer. RoundCube depends on the memory on the server, and how much of that the server admin has allowed PHP and the web server to get. Most admins keep a tight reign on the PHP memory allocation because of security issues and the possibility of a runaway process causing a type of Denial Of Service to other users. If you crash your computer because T-Bird demands too much memory, it only impacts you. If your requests on the server through RoundCube cause the server to crash, that impacts many more users.
And yet, Squirrelmail seems to work fine with mailboxes that have over
1000 emails. Not well, but it works.
lewis Eklund butler wrote:
On 25-Jan-2008, at 07:22, chasd wrote:
A mailbox with a large number of messages takes a lot of memory to display and handle. Thunderbird can simply request more memory from your computer. RoundCube depends on the memory on the server, and how much of that the server admin has allowed PHP and the web server to get. Most admins keep a tight reign on the PHP memory allocation because of security issues and the possibility of a runaway process causing a type of Denial Of Service to other users. If you crash your computer because T-Bird demands too much memory, it only impacts you. If your requests on the server through RoundCube cause the server to crash, that impacts many more users.
And yet, Squirrelmail seems to work fine with mailboxes that have over
1000 emails. Not well, but it works.
Ah, yes, sorry chasd, I was going to reply but completely forgot to.
Anyway, Lewis pretty much summarizes what I was going to say. To a user it doesn't matter why it doesn't work; if it suddenly goes blank it's broken. A car made out of paper might have very good reasons for not being able to go >5 m/h; if it suddenly falls apart without warning it's just broken (assuming for now the driver doesn't expect this, which is the case for roundcube and large mail boxes).
Now, a clear warning changes things; "Warning; your e-mail box is growing large, roundcube may stop working soon." and "Warning: roundcube does not handle large mail boxes well with these settings; read this HowTo." inform users and system administrators and don't leave them surprised/iritated when they suddenly can't see anything anymore.
Roundcube has other benefits thunderbird doesn't have (like being accessible everywhere) and uses it, in a way, to advertise. People will feel weird if suddenly something appears to be broken they didn't know about. Especially if it's known but not told.
"Inherently broken" doesn't mean "it doesn't matter", it just means "can't be fixed". And do note that it's not the fact that roundcube doesn't work that I am criticizing, it's the fact that it doesn't tell the user about it. And that "bug" /can/ be fixed.
sorry-for-the-rant-ly-yours, b^4 _______________________________________________ List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/users/
A car made out of paper might have very good reasons for not being
able to go >5 m/h; if it suddenly falls apart without warning it's
just broken
I wouldn't say it is broken, it is just being used outside of its
design parameters ;)
(assuming for now the driver doesn't expect this, which is the case
for roundcube and large mail boxes).
The case of RC and large mailboxes is more like running out of fuel
in a car, you should see it coming. That was the premise of my post.
Granted, the "fuel gauge" is in a text config file buried in the
server somewhere. I was attempting to explain how to interpret the
error and that the result was not totally unexpected if you
understand what is going on.
Roundcube has other benefits thunderbird doesn't have (like being
accessible everywhere) and uses it, in a way, to advertise. People
will feel weird if suddenly something appears to be broken they
didn't know about. Especially if it's known but not told.
However, a desktop app is not the same as a web app. Particularly
comparing a web app _almost_ at 0.1 and a desktop app that is at
version 2.x.
"Inherently broken" doesn't mean "it doesn't matter", it just means
"can't be fixed".
Some people jump to "Inherently broken" when the problem is really "I
don't understand what is going on" which is what I was attempting to
explain.
And that "bug" /can/ be fixed.
I'm sure the RC developers would appreciate a patch with those changes.
Charles Dostale System Admin - Silver Oaks Communications http://www.silveroaks.com/ 824 17th Street, Moline IL 61265
List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/users/
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bb -
chasd -
lewis Eklund butler