Re: Large spool mboxes => slow?

On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, Kelson wrote:

> Hugh Sasse wrote:
> > Enabling server mode is not possible given some types of client (from my
> > reading of the docs).  I don't know all the clients people use, so I must
> > err on the side of caution.  Or is that paranoid in 2006?
> 
> I'm not aware of any problems with server mode and particular POP clients.  As
> I understand it, the only issue is whether any other programs on the local
> system are altering the mailbox.  If it's just sendmail and qpopper, it should
> be OK.  But it's entirely possible I've missed something in the docs.
> 
> That said, you *can* enable server mode for specific users.

I forgot about that. Thank you.
> 
> We have a similar problem where we couldn't turn server mode on for everyone
> because some people use webmail and others use POP.  However, our "problem"

We have some using webmail too.

> users -- the ones with the biggest mailboxes who leave mail on the server and
> check the most frequently -- only used POP.
> 
> We put the following in our qpopper.config:
> 	set spool-options = true

Which seems to be the same as putting -U in the inetd.conf file...

> Then we set up .username.qpopper-options files in our spool directory
> containing:
> 	set server-mode = true
And can I add
        set fast-update = true
on a per user basis?

Also, if I ./configure with --enable-cache-dir (which, I think I
don't need to write as --enable-cachedir=/var/mail because of the
default - is that right?)  then will it only come into play for
users in server mode?  

Just trying to figure out how all these things interact :-)

> 
> The server used to have major I/O delays whenever one of these users
> connected.  After I set this up for just 5 accounts, the problem cleared up
> completely.

that sounds like it would help considerably.

        Thank you,
        Hugh