Hi All:
We have the standard toaster setup with courier-imap and squirrelmail. We are finding that although squirrelmail has acceptable performance from web browsers within our network it is agonizingly slow when accessed outside of our network - even from high speed connections. We have plenty of spare bandwidth on our network and everything else (web sites, etc.) work quickly. We also have squirrelmail running on the same server as courier-imap.
Squirrelmail seems to be generating fairly lite-weight web pages so we are at a loss to understand why it runs so slow from outside our network. Could there be numerous and very large cookies being stored on the browsing pc? We do have a number of plug-in modules installed in SM but that should produce the same load within the network.
What are other people seeing? or should we just switch to SqWebMail?
Best Regards,
Jeff Koch
There are a few things to consider:
1. Is it behind SSL? If so, you might consider also offering it unencrypted. This can be a BIG slow down.
2. Try increasing the MAXDAEMONS and MAXPERIP in courier-imap. If you are worried about DOS attacks from the outside, then only offer it on localhost, or setup multiple instances of courier-imap. Also, try using authdaemon, and crank up the number of authdaemons as well. I've found this to help a lot, as it caches logins.
3. Lastly, PHP is an interpreted language, and can be slow under heavy loads. You could look into a PHP "optimizer", and there are some mentioned on the SquirrelMail site. I have no experience with them, however.
I've used the first 2 options above to squeeze much more of hardware. But ultimately, you might just need more hardware.
Regards,
Bill Shupp
