A few days ago I installed dovecot stable to replace uw-imap. The install went well and all boxes were converted ok. When accessing the new imap server though, certain operations seem much slower, in particular, moving mail between boxes is very slow, and I have received several complaints from users that the mail server has slowed down. I can't figure out what the slow point is as maildir should be faster than mbox. -- I sense much NT in you. NT leads to Bluescreen. Bluescreen leads to downtime. Downtime leads to suffering. NT is the path to the darkside. Powerful Unix is. Public Key: ftp://ftp.tallye.com/pub/lorenl_pubkey.asc Fingerprint: CEE1 AAE2 F66C 59B5 34CA C415 6D35 E847 0118 A3D2 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20050611/84c63021/attachment-0001.bin>
"Loren M. Lang" <lorenl at alzatex.com> writes:> A few days ago I installed dovecot stable to replace uw-imap. The > install went well and all boxes were converted ok. When accessing > the new imap server though, certain operations seem much slower, in > particular, moving mail between boxes is very slow, and I have > received several complaints from users that the mail server has > slowed down. I can't figure out what the slow point is as maildir > should be faster than mbox.What UNIX are you running on, what filesystem and what kind of hardware are we talking about? Is maildir_copy_with_hardlinks set? I find that there are circumstances on modern hardware when mbox is actually faster than maildir. An Intel box with a good disk system will easily load and traverse a multi-megabyte mbox in the time it takes to do a few seeks on the disk (ie finding the various mails in a maildir). Of course, on dovecot, you can't have folders in folders with mbox, so it's not really an alternativefor me. But maybe you should try it to compare. If your users mostly do operations on massive amounts of mail, it may be an improvement on modern hardware. -- Anders "Quest" Qvist Ye olde jungle proverb: Even the Phantom must turn on the light to see what's in his goth wardrobe.
Loren M. Lang wrote: > A few days ago I installed dovecot stable to replace uw-imap. The > install went well and all boxes were converted ok. When accessing the > new imap server though, certain operations seem much slower, in > particular, moving mail between boxes is very slow, and I have received > several complaints from users that the mail server has slowed down. I > can't figure out what the slow point is as maildir should be faster than > mbox. What email client is being used? I've seen some similar behaviour with Thunderbird which I believe (from reading Bugzilla) may be a Thunderbird IMAP bug rather than a Dovecot issue. John -- John Allen Bofferdange, Luxembourg allen at vo.lu http://www.homepages.lu/allen
This might help: 3. Set dir_index features on hard disk. # tune2fs -l /dev/hda3 | grep features if you see dir_index then you are all set. If dir_index is missing then add it using: # umount /dev/hda3 # tune2fs -O dir_index /dev/hda3 # e2fsck -fD /dev/hda3 # mount /dev/hda3 Now you can handle ginormous maildir directories with out breaking a sweat. When we switched from UW-IMAP mbox to dovecot maildir it was slightly slower (3% maybe) at downloading headers but much faster in every other aspect. Jeff Graves, MCSA Customer Support Engineer Image Source, Inc. 10 Mill Street Bellingham, MA 02019 508.966.5200 - Phone 508.966.5170 - Fax jeff at image-src.com - Email www.image-src.com -----Original Message----- From: dovecot-bounces at dovecot.org [mailto:dovecot-bounces at dovecot.org] On Behalf Of Loren M. Lang Sent: Saturday, June 11, 2005 12:27 PM To: dovecot at dovecot.org Subject: [Dovecot] Dovecot stable slow A few days ago I installed dovecot stable to replace uw-imap. The install went well and all boxes were converted ok. When accessing the new imap server though, certain operations seem much slower, in particular, moving mail between boxes is very slow, and I have received several complaints from users that the mail server has slowed down. I can't figure out what the slow point is as maildir should be faster than mbox. -- I sense much NT in you. NT leads to Bluescreen. Bluescreen leads to downtime. Downtime leads to suffering. NT is the path to the darkside. Powerful Unix is. Public Key: ftp://ftp.tallye.com/pub/lorenl_pubkey.asc Fingerprint: CEE1 AAE2 F66C 59B5 34CA C415 6D35 E847 0118 A3D2