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On Feb 13, 2007, at 2:09 PM, Kenn Murrah wrote:

Greetings.

Is it generally more efficient to run roundcube on the same server
as the email (IMAP) server, or is it better to run from a different
server?

Thanks.

It depends. If your imap server has a lot of users and is already
fairly heavily loaded, then the addition of an http server + round
cube only adds contention. If you add ssl into the mix you're only
increasing the requirements.

However, if you're lightly loaded and the server has extra resources
you'll gain a bit of speed from a tcp connection going over the loop
back interface rather than a fully remote socket. But, that also
means that the cpu context switches between the httpd process and the
imapd service.

So, really, you'd have to measure it in your specific situation. For
what its worth I have an apache instance on host A with round cube
installed. It is configured to talk to cyrus imap on host B and store
user data (postgres stuff like address book info) on a database
running on host C.

While testing this I had everything running on one dev box. The only
thing that had to change were configuration files. Obviously one
solution scales further than others.

Hope that helps.

J. Harvest past, fires cast Ashen shades this Halloween We are set now to Beherit the earth

Is it generally more efficient to run roundcube on the same server as the email (IMAP) server, or is it better to run from a different server?

depending on your load, there should or should not be some considerable change.

scenario 1: web server is on same switch (LAN) as IMAP server -- you should not have any problem with this even if you have 100 simultaneous users on the web front of the setup.

scenario 2: web server is located at a remote location -- roundcube settings permits you to cache the messages of mailbox content. of course this may have some payload on the web server, but speeds up RC's loading

<code>

// enable caching of messages and mailbox data in the local database. // this is recommended if the IMAP server does not run on the same machine $rcmail_config['enable_caching'] = TRUE;

// lifetime of message cache // possible units: s, m, h, d, w $rcmail_config['message_cache_lifetime'] = '10d';

</code>

having RC run on the IMAP server is also not a bad idea, but when you cant do that....the above two may help you out. test each to your specific situation

-- Mike Kwatampora

Of course, you might discount this possibility, but remember that one in a million chances happen 99% of the time.

ph10