Slow "status" calls...

[Robert Mueller]

I was noticing that IMAP 'status' calls to update the message counts in
our web interface seemed to be taking quite a bit of time. I ran a stand
alone script to check this, and found:

Time: 0.002, msgs:    12, unseen:    10, folder: INBOX.spam
Time: 0.004, msgs: 18978, unseen: 18978, folder: INBOX.postfix
Time: 4.930, msgs: 24688, unseen:  5002, folder: INBOX.mod_perl
Time: 0.010, msgs:  2707, unseen:  2707, folder: INBOX.processed

Strange, one folder in particular was taking a long time to status, while
all the other folders, including a folder of similar size were several
orders of magnitude faster!

Having a quick look in the spool dir, everything seemed ok.

[root at www mod_perl]# ls -l cyrus*
-rw-------    1 cyrus    cyrus    15022700 Sep 19 01:03 cyrus.cache
-rw-------    1 cyrus    cyrus         243 Sep 18 23:41 cyrus.header
-rw-------    1 cyrus    cyrus     1284164 Sep 19 01:03 cyrus.index

Anyway, I deleted the cyrus.* files, touched some empty ones, and did a
reconstruct on the folder and ran my test again:

Time: 0.003, msgs:    12, unseen:    10, folder: INBOX.spam
Time: 0.004, msgs: 18978, unseen: 18978, folder: INBOX.postfix
Time: 0.003, msgs: 24688, unseen:  5002, folder: INBOX.mod_perl
Time: 0.002, msgs:  2707, unseen:  2707, folder: INBOX.processed

Much better! Still wondering what happened here, and how to avoid it in
the future.

Rob
----------
robm at fastmail.fm
Sign up at http://fastmail.fm for fast, ad free, IMAP accessible email