[Dovecot] POP3 with lot of messages
Running Dovecot 1.1.8. Have several email accounts with thousands of messages in them that are left on server. Is there anyway to speed up POP3 access without switching to IMAP? Doubt it but thought I would ask.
Matt
On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 10:51 -0500, Matt wrote:
Running Dovecot 1.1.8. Have several email accounts with thousands of messages in them that are left on server. Is there anyway to speed up POP3 access without switching to IMAP? Doubt it but thought I would ask.
What is slow in it? As long as you haven't disabled index files, Dovecot should handle that fast.
Receiving the message list is slow. I imaging because there are several thousand messages in that list. To bad it could not gzip the list first like apache can do with certain files.
I am pretty sure nothing can be done about this rather then use IMAP instead.
Matt
On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 10:51 -0500, Matt wrote:
Running Dovecot 1.1.8. Have several email accounts with thousands of messages in them that are left on server. Is there anyway to speed up POP3 access without switching to IMAP? Doubt it but thought I would ask.
What is slow in it? As long as you haven't disabled index files, Dovecot should handle that fast.
On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 14:56 -0500, Matt wrote:
Receiving the message list is slow. I imaging because there are several thousand messages in that list.
But is it slow because the actual downloading the list is slow, or because it's using a lot of disk I/O? If it's the former then there's nothing Dovecot can do.
To bad it could not gzip the list first like apache can do with certain files.
If you use SSL/TLS it's possible to use compression if the client supports it and your OpenSSL supports it. I don't really know how commonly it's supported by clients or even OpenSSL.
I am pretty sure nothing can be done about this rather then use IMAP instead.
Yeah, I'd guess so.
On May 19, 2009, at 8:51 AM, Matt wrote:
Running Dovecot 1.1.8. Have several email accounts with thousands of messages in them that are left on server. Is there anyway to speed
up POP3 access without switching to IMAP? Doubt it but thought I would ask.
Is it slow on the local machine? Use a pop client on the local
machine, command line probably more ideal, and see if it is slow. If
it is not, then you know you are network bound.
If it is still slow, then it cold be drive speed bound, and a faster
drive would help. Maybe you can move the files to a faster drive as a
test.
Keep an eye on CPU usage as well, though I doubt that would be the case.
In my limited tests, with 1000+ messages in a POP mailbox in Dovecot,
it was pulling them in as fast as I could ever imagine them. I
certainly felt it was more network bound than the software slowing it
down.
I would do some tests, to see if you can find out where the bottleneck
really is.
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *
participants (3)
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Matt
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Scott Haneda
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Timo Sirainen