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Quoting STeve Andre' <[log in to unmask]>: >> Are you talking webmail or some other email client? >> >> As someone else pointed out, webmail can be notoriously slow on >> inboxes exceeding 1500 messages, especially under load. >> >> If it's webmail, moving messages from the inbox to other folders >> can have a tremendous impact on response times. >> > Sorry I wasn't more clear: the user has been using mail.msu.edu for > a while, and noticed that the response time became worse. It could > be her computer or our net connection, but I did a little checking > and couldn't see any problem. > > Is there a point with inbox size where things get worse? I'd always > thought that the speed was some kind of inverse of the size of mail > that was somewhere near linear. Is that not the case? It can depend on the loads on the servers, but generally, one sees a performance degradation when the inbox messages exceed about 1500 messages. When there are loads on the servers, it gets worse (i.e. when students start using the systems during classes, etc.) I don't recall if this has been mentioned before, but the mailboxes are in Maildir format. This means that every message is its own file. So if you make a call to the inbox, it has to open and read every file to get the header info and/or content. Just to do an 'ls' on the directory can take some time. This is why webmail gets progressively worse as the inbox grows. Email clients are just as bad, the only difference is that you can use your email client while your client is synching with the server. Not the same when trying to generate webpages. Hopefully I've explained this well. If not, fire back for further clarification. Thanks. -- Joe Besko Phone: 517.432.5335 Systems Programmer Fax: 517.353.9847 Michigan State University E-mail: jbesko(a)msu.edu 313 Computer Center East Lansing, MI 48824-1042