performance on large inboxes

[Paul Dekkers]

Sebastian Hagedorn wrote:
> -- Marten Lehmann <lehmann at cnm.de> is rumored to have mumbled on 8.
> November 2006 17:02:52 +0100 regarding performance on large inboxes:
>
>> from time to time we have users with a very large inbox, which means it
>> contains 20.000 messages or even more. My quite general question is:
>> What
>> is cyrus doing once a user logs in through imap or pop3? It seems, that
>> it is parsing the directory, which takes very long.
>
> I think you will find that only some clients take that long. Try
> Mulberry and let us know how long it takes to open such a mailbox ...
> if *that* is slow as well, there really is something wrong.

Actually, I don't have this problem with Thunderbird either; it became
the default mail-client at our Office and one of the reasons behind it
was that our average IMAP-archive choked Outlook (and well, so would my
inbox, which I archive only yearly and is now certainly over 20.000
messages - so it would bother me).
So maybe you're indeed facing the quality of your IMAP client, and it
would be interesting if dovecot performs better on an equally sized
mailbox (but it does not in our enviroment).

Paul

P.S. It would be interesting if users want offline mail ;-) that can
slow down your client-experience as well.
I believe Thunderbird is bad at it but I never really used it.