I've been working to migrate several hundered users on to our new mail servers, which run dovecot 0.99.11 (RHEL4). The problem I'm seeing is that deleting or moving a message seems to take a very long time. It's not uncommon for Thundirbird (1.0.7) to have delays of 5-10 seconds to delete a single message from my Inbox (<500k) and place it in my Trash folder (~100MB right now).
The systems are Dell PowerEdge 1850 (dual 3.6GHz Xeon) with two 300GB SCSI drives in a hardware mirror. Filesystems are ext3 on LVM. Inboxes are on /var/spool/mail (/export/mail, symlinked into /var). User mail folders are in their home directories (/export/homes1/<user>, automounted to /home/<user>; some home directories are NFS automounted from a NetApp). Both the mail spool and home directories are available over NFS for compatibility reasons with the former setup.
What's really bugging me is that I've used the same software (RHEL4 and dovecot 0.9x.x) at my last workplace, and the performance was outstanding; it beat UWIMAPd hands-down, especially with large mailboxes. Here, the opposite seems to be true. The primary difference seems to be that we're using NFS here, but I wasn't using NFS at my last job.
I'm getting a lot of grief over the delays when users delete mail or move mail from their inbox to one of their mail folders. Enough so that they're now resisting moving to the new server.
Where do I look to find out what's causing the slowness? What can I do to make it faster?
Mailbox formats are mbox.
Using these options in /etc/dovecot.conf:
protocols = imaps pop3s imap_listen = [::] pop3_listen = [::] ssl_cert_file = /usr/share/ssl/certs/csefast.ucsd.edu_cert.pem ssl_key_file = /usr/share/ssl/private/csefast.ucsd.edu_key.pem login_dir = /var/run/dovecot-login login = imap login = pop3 verbose_proctitle = yes first_valid_uid = 100 default_mail_env = mbox:~/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u mail_full_filesystem_access = yes mbox_locks = dotlock fcntl auth = default auth_mechanisms = plain auth_userdb = passwd auth_passdb = pam auth_user = root
Thanks in advance,
Gregory
-- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade Sr. Systems Administrator Computer Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego Office: EBU3b 1216 Phone: (858) 822-2625 E-mail: gkra@ucsd.edu