slow populating a mailbox

[Ross Boylan]

I've been using the UW-IMAP mailutil to copy messages from my regular
Unix mailboxes (for mutt) to IMAP.  The messages are all going to a
single folder for a single user.

My impression is that this is rather slow, about 20 minutes for 100MG
worth of messages.  There is virtually no CPU use while this happens.

The source traditional mailbox and destination IMAP server are on the
same machine, using the same hard disk (no, it's not a "real" server).

First, is this performance to be expected, or might there be something
here I can improve?  I have quite a bit of mail I'd like to migrate,
so if there's an easy way to speed this up I'd like to do so.

Second, where should I look to diagnose or solve this problem?

I've seen a rather large array of answers on this list, and am unsure
how to start.  I'm also not sure how to strace imapd (I've seen the
suggestion to use it and a previous request for details, but no
response).

This system is not in real use, so I have some flexibility.

This is Debian GNU/Linux system with a SATA disk, using EVMS volume
management and Reiser FS.  2.6 kernel.  Pentium 4 CPU.  I'm using the
Debian packaging of Cyrus 2.2, and have generally not done a lot of
tuning/tweaking at any level (kernel, file system, Cyrus).

Thanks.

Ross Boylan