Slow LIST command

[Richard Gilbert]

On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, Rob Siemborski wrote:

> > Having watched the activity, the thing which seems to consume most of the
> > resources are the LIST "" * and LIST "" % commands.  These return with a
> > response like "OK Completed (1.480 secs 28 calls)" but can take a very
> > long real time.  Is there anything which can be done to speed up the
> > performance of the LIST command?  My imapd.conf is appended.
>
> Are you using the skiplist backend for your mboxlist?
>
> If not, that should tremendously increase LIST performance.

Thank you very much for this priceless piece of information.  Before
switching to skiplists, our IMAP server was completely swamped at busy
times making the IMP Webmail service almost unusable.  It is now mostly
idling!

The LIST command mentioned above was obviously load dependent because the
same thing took 0.58 seconds when it was quiet just before I did the
upgrade.  However, after the upgrade it took just 0.05 seconds!

Thank you again.

Richard
--
Richard Gilbert
Corporate Information and Computing Services
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK
Phone: +44 114 222 3028   Fax: +44 114 222 3040