Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue) [LWN.net]

Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)

Posted Oct 5, 2009 23:43 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313)
Parent article: Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)

doing a test of 'downloading 12000 e-mails' is not really relavent for a good IMAP implementataion.

you won't do that, you will view the e-mail headers, read some (or all) of the messages, but unless you are trying to support offline mode you won't download them all.

the fact that many/most of these clients _do_ download all of the messages when you first connect is an indication that they are broken by design

moving messages to a different account is also a fairly unusual event.

better tests would be

how long does it take to connect to the server for the first time after the 12000 new messages appear

move the messages to a different folder on the same server

sort the messages

thread the messages

add some new messages and thread the messages again.

how long to search for a particular subject, from address, etc

can you tag an entire thread for action

note that for all of these tests to be valid, you need to make sure that your IMAP server supports all the features, I don't know if dovecot supports all of these.

I use cyrus as my mail server (running on XFS) with pine and mulberry as my clients and they easily handle accounts with hundreds of folders with some folders having 60K+ messages

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Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)

Posted Oct 6, 2009 9:06 UTC (Tue) by kruemelmo (guest, #8279) [Link] (1 responses)

mod parent up!

Having said that... I always thought thunderbird downloads all mail to perform its spam filter check. It seems strange that it *still* needs the server connection to display the mails.

Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)

Posted Oct 6, 2009 9:42 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

that may be an additional reason, but it was downloading the entire mail evenbefore it gained spam filters and does so even if spam filters are disabled (say you have server-level spam filters)

some/many IMAP servers have very extensive mail filtering capabilities (including the ability to have per-user filter rules on the server)