Archiveopteryx

Posted Mar 18, 2010 13:04 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
Parent article: Archiveopteryx

Operations like deleting or refiling groups of messages go notably faster than with Dovecot on the same server.

I found Dovecot to be very, *very* slow, in comparison to good old UW-IMAP. Perhaps that was cause I stuck with mbox and Dovecot is optimised for some other mailbox format. However, dovecot was simply unuseable. It was much easier to switch back to UW-IMAP than converting all my email to risk discovering that Dovecot was still slow.

UW-IMAP is responsive enough for me, even though I run it on a 700MHz Athlon with 512MB of RAM, and an INBOX of 24k. It remains useable even with mailboxes of 100k in size - on this hardware. Opening such folders can take a minute or two though, but once open access and search is fast (MUA potentially may be a factor here). I found my UW-IMAP server, on its ancient hardware, was faster than the corporate Netscape iPlanet derived IMAP at my previous employer, even though my mailboxes there generally were 1/10th the size (greater latency to server perhaps was one factor there - one was at home, the other was a WAN link away, even in the office).

I'm very interested in faster IMAP servers, but Dovecot does not seem to be it (for me).

Alpine's beautifully user-friendly, yet powerful, query interface is great for searching. It's very expressive and allows for chains of different criteria to be applied in succession. Also, Alpine supports tagging mail (before a certain well-known web mail thing did, I think), which can help to keep track of things.

The one thing I need to do is switch to saving my outgoing mail in my Inbox.

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Archiveopteryx

Posted Mar 18, 2010 19:51 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (2 responses)

I seem to recall severe security (and other) problems with UW-IMAP, and the project is dead. We were forced to move to dovecot, and then redo the mailboxes. The end result was much faster (but there was a hardware upgrade too, so take this with a grain of salt).

Archiveopteryx

Posted Mar 19, 2010 14:24 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, I remember that too, but I thought that was partly with RedHat/Fedora
not packaging updates anymore? I have the vague notion licencing issues were
also involved, but am not certain. However, it appeared back in the main
fedora repository. The upstream code seems to be maintained wrt
minor bug fixing and security updates. No active development otherwise
though.

Archiveopteryx

Posted Mar 19, 2010 18:19 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

In our case, we carried an old version of UW-IMAP around for some time, as the later versions just couldn't be coerced to build on Red Hat, or if they did did not work. In the end we just ditched it for the official dovecot package.

Archiveopteryx

Posted Mar 19, 2010 22:58 UTC (Fri) by cras (guest, #7000) [Link] (2 responses)

Wonder if you were using some ancient Dovecot version, because typically people say that
switching from UW-IMAP to Dovecot increased their disk I/O performance by 10x or so with mbox.
But yes, mbox is kind of a second-class citizen there and it's possible you were just using a buggy
version.. There is also mbox_very_dirty_syncs=yes setting to make mbox much faster when it has
had external changes (although defaults are identical to UW-IMAP's behavior).

Archiveopteryx

Posted Mar 20, 2010 3:17 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, this was probably about 4 or 5 years ago - so some kind of 0.99
version i guess. I may try out dovecot again so when I next have time if you
think mbox performance should have improved and be on a par with UW-IMAP.

Archiveopteryx

Posted Mar 20, 2010 12:48 UTC (Sat) by cras (guest, #7000) [Link]

Yeah, v0.99 was pretty bad in all ways. All of the mail accessing and indexing code was redesigned
for v1.0. They could almost be thought of as different products..