Chris Mason said: > We have performance issues with Squirrelmail and imap in general due to > users with large amounts of mail. We have one user, the president of the > company, who insists on keeping every mail he ever sent anyone or > received,
Same thing I do, why should I be bothered to pull the information out of emails to hard copy, a word processor or PIM? I file my emails into folders and it gives me a simple filing cabinet of all my correspondence. I encourage my users to do likewise. With a president who demands this kind of usage you shouldn't have to hard of a time getting a hardware budget to support it. > and routinely sends 8 MB emails. His mail is topping 4 GB sorted into > various folders, and he is bringing our 2 X 2.4 GHz Xeon server to a halt. > His email account has become a file system, as he travels extensively and > wants access to these files while on the road using Squirrelmail. As he is > the president I can’t tell him to clean up his act. My biggest fear is he > will insist on a move to Exchange and that it would be faster as I have > always advocated Linux servers. Then you need to get Linux performing as well as Exchange would. Time for an upgrade. > I suspect the the standard Redhat 9 uw-imap is not the best imap > implementation for this type of usage. No it definitely is not. uw's mailbox storage format is ineffecient (at least in terms of speed) and prone to corruption. It's also a memory hog. > Cyrus is interesting but I suspect > a > bear to administer, Yes, it is (a bear) > and I don’t know what else to consider. What have you > found to be faster for users with huge mail accounts, what kind of speed > enhancements work, Consider Courier-IMAP http://www.courier-mta.org It's a simple setup, especially on RedHat based systems where you can quickly compile the RPM from source. Courier stores messages in Maildirs, these are much quicker and nearly immune to locking/corruption issues because 1 email = 1 file. In addition to the storage format, Courier uses much less memory and resources to begin with. I have folders with +10,000 emails and they still open in seconds. > and how did you migrate the users? Back in January, I migrated about 1,000 accounts from a Windows IMAP Server with mail storage similar to UW-IMAP over to Courier-IMAP. I created a squirrelmail plugin that makes use of Armin Diehl's IMAPCopy program (http://home.arcor.de/armin.diehl/imapcopy/imapcopy.html) in order to move all messages from the old IMAP Server to the new one. The copy had to occur when the user logged in to Squirrelmail so that their password was available for login to both IMAP Servers. I still have the plugin code posted at http://www.intranet.pbu.edu/imap_move/imap_move.001-1.4.2.tar.gz However, this might not be the best route for you as the accounts I moved were limited to 50mb. 4gb mailboxes would take an eternity. My suggestion would be to manually move the really big accounts then use IMAPCopy or one of the mbox2md (Mailbox to Maildir google for them) scripts. -- Jay Lee Network / Systems Administrator Information Technology Dept. Philadelphia Biblical University -- ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/ -- squirrelmail-users mailing list Posting Guidelines: http://squirrelmail.org/wiki/wiki.php?MailingListPostingGuidelines List Address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List Archives: http://news.gmane.org/thread.php?group=gmane.mail.squirrelmail.user List Archives: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id)95 List Info: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/squirrelmail-users
