> Amos Gouaux wrote: >> Well, my inbox currently has 3568 messages in it and PINE pops it open >> in a jiffy. You need to keep in mind that Cyrus caches things like >> the headers. See the four "cyrus.*" files in each folder. > > Right, but this may still be a problem because those files are in > the same directory as all the messages. Maybe you don't have a > problem yet because you have "only" 3568 messages and there aren't many > users with large folders, so once Cyrus has looked in that > dir once all the entries are in the dcache. But when you have > dozens of users with folder of 10K+ messages a machine with 1GB > of RAM may not have enough dcache to hold it all and so every > time Cyrus tries to access the header cache (cyrus.* file) in > your folder it will have to go back to disk, read the whole huge > directory, search it for the cache.* files, etc.
We're running cyrus 2.0.9 with 19000 users (in the same directory, because I was in a hurry..doh!) ...recently I discovered that one of my "nobody" boxes had 54,000 messages in it. Pine showed absolutely no delays in opening the mail...a webmail client I have got hosed but I believe it tries to actually figure out your message situation for itself (looping thru the number of messages instead of consulting a header file)..don't know for sure...anyway, had I increased the php timeout it would've eventually been fine. Of course expunge took a LONG time, but the server did great under the stress. Is the performance optimal? Probably not. It does work, however. My FS is ext2 on RH7.1, tho I'm seriously investigating a journaling FS for this machine. This is a pIII 800mhz with 896Mb RAM. My .02. jenn
