dovecot - Feb 2018 - Optimizing search performance for mobile devices / web mailer / general - solr plugin config

Hi all,

we run dovecot for a long time now with no complains from the users ? until this
week. Some users say, the search in mailfolders from iPhone (which only stores a
few mails and search most on the server as I know) or our web mailer (SOGo,
which I currently search also on the imap server) is ?slow?.

As this is sort of individual experience, I was thinking of ways to speed up the
search and came across the fts_solr plugin.

My question is, can I ?just? configure the its_solg plugin as described at the
dovecot wiki? https://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS/Solr
<https://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS/Solr>

How difficult is is to set up a solr server for that purpose? As our current
mail hardware is not busy at all, is it ok to install Solr on the same
hardware/server?

May be someone using that setup can give me some hints?

And: How hard is it to switch back to the ?build in? default search if we don?t
see any benefit from hosting a solr server too.


	Thanks for feedback and suggestions . Regards . G?tz


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Hello G?tz,

As an intermediate skill level admin I found it not too hard. The 
dovecot part was easier than the solr one, mostly as I am stuck on an 
old system.

Solr indeed is blazingly fast. Searching several imap (sub)folders slows 
it down a bit, because imap only always searches a single one and then 
another one and so on. A proposed rfc to tackle that does not move forward.

There is a trick to have messages indexed on arrival, instead of at 
mailbox access, "fts_autoindex = yes" in the plugin section. This is
not
mentioned in the dovecot wiki page but might be useful.

In solr schema.xml I put some extra "copyField" stances, so from, to, 
and subject get indexed with body. My users are mostly on thunderbird, 
which only does body searches on the server.

Happy Hacking

Peter


Am 23.02.18 um 08:55 schrieb G?tz Reinicke:
> Hi all,
> 
> we run dovecot for a long time now with no complains from the users ? 
> until this week. Some users say, the search in mailfolders from iPhone 
> (which only stores a few mails and search most on the server as I know) 
> or our web mailer (SOGo, which I currently search also on the imap 
> server) is ?slow?.
> 
> As this is sort of individual experience, I was thinking of ways to 
> speed up the search and came across the fts_solr plugin.
> 
> My question is, can I ?just? configure the its_solg plugin as described 
> at the dovecot wiki? https://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS/Solr
> 
> How difficult is is to set up a solr server for that purpose? As our 
> current mail hardware is not busy at all, is it ok to install Solr on 
> the same hardware/server?
> 
> May be someone using that setup can give me some hints?
> 
> And: How hard is it to switch back to the ?build in? default search if 
> we don?t see any benefit from hosting a solr server too.
> 
> 
> Thanks for feedback and suggestions . Regards . G?tz
> 
>

On Fri Feb 23 2018 03:51:37 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time), Peter
Chiochetti <pch at myzel.net> wrote:
> There is a trick to have messages indexed on arrival, instead of at 
> mailbox access, "fts_autoindex = yes" in the plugin section. This
is not
> mentioned in the dovecot wiki page but might be useful.
Not sure why you would say that...

That setting is mentioned specifically twice...

https://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS