On Thu, 2011-06-09 at 14:45 +0200, Vincent Richomme wrote:
Hi,
I plan to develop a new web service where one of its module is a webmail and I am thinking about some implementation details. From a interface point of view I wanted to adopt the same logic a outlook(desktop) or yahoo webmail and not split emails into pages. I mean I just want a single datatable view where user can scroll to see his old messages and data are updated only when user release the vertical scrollbar. When I look at current webmail (roundcube for instance) I can see that a cache is used to stored emails headers and I was wondering if it was really necessary ?
You mean Roundcube's own local cache?
Once a user has passed the login process I would like to retrieve only the emails that will be displayed (actually a bit more, I am thinking of 150) but I am wondering if it's a good idea to not use a cache for headers. For instance if I have thousands of users on the same machine, will it support it ? Will it be fast enough ? Of course I will try by myself the different options but would be curious to have some opinions.
Dovecot's cache is also pretty fast. But then again it is easier to scale web servers than IMAP servers by just adding more servers.