Hi,

I am having problems with Squirrelmail randomly runnning really slowly.
It has times when it runs lightning fast and other times it comes to a
crawl.  I'm having a hard time diagnosing what is causing the problem,
whether it's my setup or the Virtual Private Server we're running on.

I'm out of ideas of what to check and try next, and I would love any suggestions or possible reasons you might conceive for my problem.

I check top and netstat, and all the VPS resources are all well beneath their limits. Our hosting provider verified that it's not a problem caused by lack of resources.

We don't have many users, less than 10 people are checking their e-mail at a time. However, it is not uncommon for them to be sending e-mails up to 5 MB.

Here are some details of my setup:

Our hosting company installed Debian 3.0 on our VPS for us, with several
default programs, including a pop server - popa3d.  I found that the
problem became better when I uninstalled the popa3d server.  Squirrelmail
went from crawling to being lightning fast when I uninstalled it. I thought the problem was solved, but then it started up again. I am sure that the pop server is not running anymore. After doing a apt-get remove, I no longer see it in the netstat reports as listening on a port.

The IMAP server I installed is Dovecot.  I am using the default IMAP port
(143), and have SMTP set with port 25.  I tried changing the address from
localhost to 127.0.0.1 (after reading the Wiki at http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/BrowseProblemsByComplaint to improve speed), but that didn't make any difference for me.

Under general options, I set server side sorting and server thread sort
to true, and did all the tests I found on a wiki page to ensure that my
Dovecot setup supported them (it does).

Here are the plugins I have installed:
Installed Plugins
    1. abook_take
    2. squirrelspell
    3. mail_fetch
    4. filters
    5. archive_mail
    6. compatibility
    7. image_buttons
    8. calendar
    9. calendar_sql_backend
    10. abook_import_export
    11. notify
    12. change_passwd
    13. abook_group
    14. spam_buttons

I am running SpamAssassin version 3.1.0. I have SpamAssasin set up to skip over large files, so it shouldn't be running on them.

I am also running:
Dovecot version 0.99.14-1 (installed from Debian's apt-get)
Apache 2
PHP 4.3.10-16 (cli)    (i believe from an apt-get)
mysql  Ver 12.22 Distrib 4.0.24 (i believe from an apt-get)
SquirrelMail version 1.4.4 (installed from Debian's apt-get)

I am also having Apache deflate all their messages, based on an idea I read somewhere on the newsgroups or the wiki.

The last time squirrelmail was running extremely slow, there were no logs in the /var/log/mail.err for that entire day.
in /var/log/mail.warn, there are a bunch of
   "gethostbyaddr(65.254.37.174) failed: 1"
messages (which I get a bunch of every day) and one
   "jB56pKDw020704: collect: premature EOM: unexpected close"
message at the beginning of the day.

also on the last slow day, the only errors in my apache2 error.log file are:
 File does not exist: /usr/share/squirrelmail/favicon.ico
which I get a ton of every day, and from what I read on the some other sites, doesn't seem like it should be causing a problem.

I have looked through all the other log files and don't see anything that looks out of the ordinary to me.

I'm currently working with my VPS provider sending them ping and traceroute to see if it's an issue with the packets. Unfortunately I don't have any of this data for the period when it was running slow. Is there another way I can determine if this slowness is caused by my hosting company or by something I've done? The slowness seems completely random to me - sometime's it during the day when they are accessing their e-mail a lot, and sometimes it's during the weekend, during the middle of the night, when I'm most likely the only one noticing the problem.


Would upgrading to SquirrelMail 1.4.5 be a logical next step to try and solve these issues? Like I said, I'm willing to consider any suggestion. I'm just need some ideas!

Thanks!
Kristen




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