Performance problems, compared to wu-imapd

[pheonix1t]

Tuomas Toropainen wrote:

>I have been running some performance tests on my cyrus test installation.  
>The computer is not very fast, but my intention was just try how cyrus
>performs compared to wu-imap on the same computer. It's 350Mhz P2 with
>256MB memory and 4,5GB scsi disk. OS is redhat 9 and filesystem ext3. I'm
>using mozilla mstone as benchmark program, and also when it has been
>running, I have used squirrelmail to see how slow the imap service gets.
>Mstone and squirrelmail are being run on other computers.
>
>The problem is that wu-imapd seems to perform much better than cyrus.  
>Cyrus version is 2.1.16, compiled with default database options. Syslog is
>not logging debug messages, and has synchronous logging disabled (-). Both
>systems have 500 test users, about 100 mails per user in INBOX. Mails are
>generated with postal and are random text, max 20kB size. I also tried
>with 100 users, the results are much same. Mstone results, squirrelmail
>speed and computer load all tell that wu-imapd is faster.
>
>For example, with 500 users, using cyrus mstone managed to retrieve 8,730
>messages during 5 minute test, averaging 652.70ms per message. But using 
>wu-imapd, 33,709 messages were retrieved, averaging 15.71ms per message.
>Maximum concurrent connections was a little lower with wu-imapd (~180 vs 
>220), but with cyrus computer load increased to 150 when there were 190 
>imapd processes. Wu-imapd caused a maximum load of ~15.
>
>What am I doing wrong, or is this computer just too slow for cyrus to 
>perform well? Or are the default databases so poor that they cayse this?
>
>Complete results are at 
>http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~tjt/imaptestit/cyrus/results.html (cyrus)
>and http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~tjt/imaptestit/wu-imapd/results.html (wu-imapd)
>
>Thank you for any help :)
>
>
>  
>
I didn't measure performance, but I recently upgraded a client's mail 
server from uw-imap to cyrus.  They had about 2gb of mail.  I was using 
the mbx mailbox format on uw-imap.  The performance on searching on 
uw-imap was getting very slow.  After I migrated the mail server to 
cyrus/postfix the performance improved drastically.  This was on a 
proliant 800 server, 550MHZ, 256RAM, 4 scsi disks.....
When I originally set them up, I didn't think their emails would get 
that big......generally for large mail servers, cyrus or courier is the 
preferred method.