Pause while selecting INBOX

[Gary Mills]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 01:46:39PM +1000, Rob Mueller wrote:
> 
> >
> >Where's the first place to look for this problem?  I/O statistics
> >show a higher read bandwidth while the backup is running, but writes
> >still dominate.  The backup would typically read all of the files in
> >a single Cyrus partition.
> 
> Some more information about your setup would be helpful.

I deliberately omitted that information, hoping that somebody would
know what happens on the server side when mutt says `selecting INBOX'.
I don't want to redesign the server at this stage, at least not until
I've isolated the problem.

> 1. Make sure you have noatime (and nodiratime if applicable) set on your FS
> 2. If on linux, use the deadline IO scheduler
> 3. If you can, split your data and meta data onto separate volumes 
> (probably a lot of work)
> 4. Install more RAM and use a 64-bit OS. x64_64 linux can cache many, many 
> more inodes and dentries in memory than x86 linux.
> 5. Upgrade to the latest cyrus and enable the status cache

Those are all good suggestions.  I'll investigate some of them.

-- 
-Gary Mills-    -Unix Support-    -U of M Academic Computing and Networking-