[HCoop-Discuss] IMAP Issues?

[Clinton Ebadi]

"Nathan Kennedy" <ntk at hcoop.net> writes:

> Hi Clinton,
>
> Webmail is working fine again for me. I use webmail a lot rather than an
> IMAP client when I'm on a machine where it's not practical to install a
> client and download everything.  Many of the times webmail has been
> apparently inaccessible, a local IMAP client works fine.  Many other times
> I don't have it available to test, and less frequently IMAP has in fact
> gone down, which confuses matters further.
>
> I'm sure having a cluttery inbox is exacerbating the problem, but it can't
> be purely a matter of the number of emails, because 1) the inaccessibility
> comes and goes, and 2) I've used webmail with close to the AFS limit in my
> Inbox before successfully (if sluggishly) in the past, and I seem to have
> even more problems recently with much fewer emails in my box.  rcube has
> generally been more robust than Squirrelmail, but as often as not both
> barf upon logging in at the same time.
>
> So while it's a mystery to me there must be some other variable, perhaps
> one of which is system load.  Ideally I should think that webmail ought to
> be robust with a couple thousand emails in a folder.  That being said, big
> email, and especially scalable POP3/IMAP, is not easy to administer, and
> free webmail solutions are not terribly good.
>
> From a practical user standpoint, I suppose I should stay away from
> webmail and use a local client or perhaps a text client on HCoop.  Or
> forward all my email and stop using HCoop for serving mail, which is sort
> of a shame, but I don't have any real solutions to offer on the
> administrative side, and I continue using @hcoop.net to serve entirely
> too-important emails for largely sentimental reasons when we don't really
> have the resources to ensure robustness.  It's shocking that we've done as
> well as we have, really--most of the time HCoop works really well, large
> webmail aside.

Hrm ... well, when I sent the message hcoop-discuss was unrouteable! So
definite blippiness because deleuze is old.

But it's good to hear that IMAP isn't all the time... *phew*. The load
is most certainly the issue here -- php scripts have limited execution
time, and courier sucks at listing large mailboxes. Throw in a side of
afs-gets-pissy when you have more than ~64k files in a directory (or, in
the case of Maildir, ~32k since the filenames are long and use two
entries) and...

I'm nearly done getting a new KVM up on fritz to handle apache &c for
members... shortly after that I want to do a new behind-the-scenes kvm
for imap and other things. I need to figure out the logical split
between tasks to prevent the terrible afs cache thrashing situation that
happens on deleuze. I was hoping to foist at least exim off onto someone
else (I am really not a fan of how mwolson set up the config --
everything is entangled in the Debian files making it a huge pain to
extract what we need/don't need to route mail; and courier requires
patches to the authdaemon to work with our setup... whereas dovecot at
the time didn't ... but now to switch to dovecot requires converting
everyone's maildir...).

Unfortunately, there is only one of me and every time I have to fix or
upgrade a new service, it means absorbing another segment of UNIX
administration from scratch :(

> Nathan
>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> ntk has reported (unfortunately on IRC where I get zero notification of
>> the problem) that IMAP has ceased working for him regularly.
>>
>> I've noticed *no* problems -- so is this a problem for anyone else? I
>> have about a decade of email at hcoop, and use it very heavily... and
>> it's always been rock solid for *me*, but not others for whatever
>> reason.
>>
>> One thing to note: if your INBOX gets too large, you will either hit the
>> afs filenames-in-directory limit (= bounces), or squirrelmail will start
>> timing out due to php time execution limits. But neither should affect
>> being able to *read* email.
>>
>> --
>> <Sonarman> WHAT??!??! you don't want to attend my roundtable on
>>            neomarxist deconstruction schemes for modern
>>            capitalism? YOU'RE PROPPING UP THE SYSTEM, PIG.
>> <Sonarman> brb latte
>>
>
>
>

-- 
clinton: last time I was a bit weak (*sniff* level four and only 18 hp)
clinton: I had a -1 intelligence modifier for the first three weeks
emacsen: what about your character?
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 229 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.hcoop.net/pipermail/hcoop-discuss/attachments/20120529/c9845af2/attachment.pgp