[PLUG] Email server performance

Robert Anderson riznob at gmail.com
Wed Apr 20 16:49:41 UTC 2005


On 4/16/05, Aaron Burt <aaron at bavariati.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 11:17:50PM -0700, Robert Anderson wrote:
> > On 4/15/05, Aaron Burt <aaron at bavariati.org> wrote:
> > > At my last job, we had a problem with performance using UW IMAPd and
> > > mbox files.  What was happening was that several users would let their
> > > inboxes get big (tens of megabytes).
> >
> > We've got users with mailboxes that are hundreds of megabytes.
> 
> Oog.
> 
> > > Then their mail client would
> > > trigger a scan through the entire mbox file whenever it did a
> > > mail-check, typically every 5 minutes.  This killed memory, disk,
> > > network and CPU.
> >
> > Do you recall what client, or does any imap client do this?
> 
> Mozilla mail, mostly.  But with UW-imapd, it could be any client; IIRC
> it scans the whole dang file whenever you do a newmail.   Oh, and I
> was wrong, it doesn't kill the network, just the other three.
> 

Thanks to all for the great feedback regarding the issues we were
having. There were a dozon or so users with gigantic mailboxes (687mb
was the largest).  Once we got them down to a reasonable size, the
disk IO dropped dramatically and performance seems to be fine.

-- 
Rob Anderson
riznob at gmail.com



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