[NMLUG] squirrelmail features

[neall at haughtmail.com (Neall)]

On Wed, October 27, 2004 9:40 pm, Aaron NMLUG" <aaron@boim.com> said:

> I may want to look into this.
> squirrel is pretty slow on my P-II/400.
> I'm not sure why... since the CPU doesn't show much load
> (with top while I'm reading mail)
> Some pages take 20-30 seconds to load/update.

Wow, this is surprising.  I've been running Squirrel Mail (SM) on my P/550
for a few years and I'm very happy with the performance.  My CPU is not
much faster than yours.  Most pages load almost immediately, with the
exception of the "folder sizes" command, which tallys the total number
(and size) of the emails in all my folders.  Even this only takes 5
seconds or so, and I have a LOT of mail in a lot of folders.  I run
SpamAssassin via procmail and sendmail, too, though this wouldn't affect
your browsing speed when perusing mail via SM.  I'd rather let the MTA
handle spam, as opposed to a SM plugin, since I connect via imap from
several different clients when not using Squirrel Mail.  By this time,
spam has already been sorted by the MTA.

I'd suggest three speedups for those using Squirrel Mail on a slower
machine.  The first, and most important, is RAM, RAM, RAM.  I'm not sure
this is directly because of Squirrel Mail, but seems to be more so a need
(or desire) of Apache 2.0.  I only have 384 Mb, but things run much faster
than when I had 256 Mb.  I get by on 384Mb (the max allowed for this
motherboard).

Second, since one typically runs their imap server and webserver on the
same machine, the Squirrel Mail connection loops back to the local imap
port.  If this applies to you, then you can implement a nice imap proxy
server, which will cache and reuse your imap connection, thereby
increasing 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.

Finally, get a good PHP caching accelerator, installed in conjunction with
SM.  I use the (nearly) famous IonCube PHP accelerator.  I saw a huge
speedup with it.  It's not open source (bummer), but it's free and it's
really easy to install the library.  It works like a charm... but just be
sure to download the version which matches your version of PHP. 
http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk.

Good luck!  Neall