[NMLUG] Re: NMLUG Digest, Vol 11, Issue 20

[neall at haughtmail.com (Neall)]

On Mon, November 1, 2004 1:12 am, "Aaron NMLUG" <aaron@boim.com>
nmlug-request@nmlug.org said:

Re: Squirrelmail

> My Spam folder won't even load anymore.
> There is a 30 second time-out.
> Even if that wasn't a problem, waiting 30 sec to
> try and review for false positives is not a very good place to be.
>
> I had it set to automagicly dump spam every week,
> but am now trying twice a week so squirrelmail can still
> deal with a folder with over 1000 messages.

I dump spam after a month.  The only reason I pick a month is that's it's
a metric by which I can see if spam is increasing or decreasing over a
monthly period.  My personal folder typically has over 1000 spams in a
month.  I use the "mark as read" SM plugin every day after I check the
spam, so I know which ones are new the next day, and I can quickly search
for false positives.  I run SpamAssassin sa-learn in a cron.daily job so
that it doesn't have to crunch 1000 messages at a time.  It's fast this
way because it knows what's previously been learned.  And it does it at 4
am.  So, I may keep spam for a month, but I use sa-learn on it every day. 
If you move a false positive out of your spam folder to a folder you learn
ham from, SA will make the approprate assessment and adjustment next time
you run sa-learn.

> like thousands of messages?  Squirrel seems to be dieing on me
> on only a handful of days of spam...

I keep all my old mail in an "archives" folder, below my regular mail
folder.  If I subcribe to it and pull it into SM to browse or search, it
isn't speedy, I admit, but there are some 10,000 messages there.  SM has
never "croaked."  It's pulled from an encrypted file-system, to boot.  The
nice thing about that is that mail backups to DVD have no clear text data.
Eveything sits in encrypted containers.  It's decrypted on the fly when
mounted as a filesystem.

> already done that.  Went from 64M to 256 and it helped a LOT.
> wend from a thrashing/swapping situation to 70-80 MB of
> buffers...

Given the amount of RAM you have, your system still seems too slow to me. 
I wonder if something else is going on?  If it's a 400 Mhz PII and came
with only 64M of RAM, I wonder if it also had a horribly slow hard drive
installed.  Or if it doesn't support (or you don't have) DMA enabled.  You
might want to look at some of the settings using 'hdparm.'  You can even
do a read-test (in Mb/sec) with hdparmto see if you're drive is the
bottleneck.

> browsing speed.  I use (what used to be) the old UPenn imap proxy, which
> is now located at http://www.imapproxy.org.  It's
>> compatible with the Cyrus imapd, as well as UW (mine), Courier, and
others.  It was designed with SM in mind.
>
> I can try that.

The speedups I suggested, PHP acceleration and the imap proxy, make a
decent SM system just a little faster.  Worth the effort.  I don't hold
out much hope that you'll see any improvement with them.  Your system
appears bottlenecked somewhere else.

Keep me posted!  Neall