[NMLUG] squirrelmail features

[aaron at boim.com (Aaron NMLUG)]

> 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,

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.

> 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.

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

>  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.

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...

>  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.

I can try that.

> 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.

another good tip, thx.

-- 
Aaron Birenboim        | I have an inferiority complex
Albuquerque, NM        |   ... but its not a very
aaron_at_birenboim.com |       good one.
>http://aaron.boim.com |