SWA is very slow

[tas]

I am currently testing the latest Comminuty version for transition. The biggest problem and the thing that will probably kill the transition is the lack of speed with SWA and my user accounts.

Currently I only loaded 6 of the largest accounts we have. The larges has around 15,000 emails broken into 6 or 8 folders. The caching speed takes minutes. And this is just for that one user.

What would anyone suggest I try?

I am running FC4, with all the latest updates.

Default install of Scalix, Tomcat and JRE included.

Server:
Compaq Proliant ML350
Dual Xeon 2 GHz
1.2 GB RAM
3 18 GB 10,000 RPM SCSI's in RAID 5

Thanks

Tim

[tas]

Would adding more RAM help things? We are looking to up it to either 4 or 8 GB.
Would that solve anything or could there be some other issue like java?

[ScalixSupport]

Hi tas,

There are a couple of things you can do.

1. Run

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omtidyu -MB -u username/mailnode

This pre-generates the mime data for the messages and should help in initial login

2. You can try to change/add the following setting to /var/opt/scalix/sys/general.cfg file

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IMAP_CORE_LINGER_BASE_TIME=
IMAP_CORE_LINGER_PER_FOLDER_TIME=

The default for the first one is 0 seconds the default for the second one is 5 minutes. This settings specify how long an SWA imap process stays running after the user logs out. This process acts as a server side cache and helps client side performance. If your users log in and out periodically (at least once an hour) you can set it to 1h, to make the process run for 1 hour after the user logs out. I don't recommend changing the IMAP_CORE_LINGER_PER_FOLDER_TIME setting unless tweaking the first setting doesn't make the performance better.

Restart the imap process after you make these changes by:

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omoff -d0 imap
omon imap

Hope this helps,
Yuri

[tas]

Thanks Yuri. I will try this today.

[aarohivi]

Tas,

Has the performance imporoved? We are suffering from similar performance problems with SWA and wanted to know if found any fixes.

[dpuryear]

Yeah, we would like to know as well. We are testing Scalix right now and I'm not sure if SWA is going to work for us. We may use Scalix with Squirrelmail or something else. Not sure. But SWA is indeed too slow.

Tas,

Has the performance imporoved? We are suffering from similar performance problems with SWA and wanted to know if found any fixes.

[florian]

dpuryear

can you tell us some things about your system configuration and also about the structure of your data (#messages, #folders)? I believe next to Yuri's tips all we can really do is to find out if your system is sized and setup allright.

Reason why I'm saying that is that I use SWA about 50% of my mail user time to really get on top of it and for me the performance works well. This is not natural, my Inbox currently has about 8000 items (used to me 20000, was ok as well) and I'm mostly using this from Germany where the mail server I'm talking to is located in our US HQ. I'm generally happy with what I get and I find it usable.

What browser are you using, btw.? Unfortunately (personal opinion), on the Windows platform, Firefox is a bit slower than IE - this is because of the way they process the JavaScript and is nothing we have direct control over.

Having said all this, I'd like to add that we're always working to improve the system in terms of performance; if anything, as a tribute to the ever-increasing volume of mail people have to face.

Our next major release will have
- rearchitecture of SWA that addresses the Firefox vs. IE performance differences
- general change in header management architecture through which SWA benefits from performance improvements in all areas where large folders are involved
- reachictected server-based search for SWA so that finding objects will become a lot more fun.

Stay tuned,
Florian.

[netpenthe]

Any more SWA performance tips?

We are wanting to move 1000 users over to Scalix (~300 premium, 700 SWA users..)

We have a brand new Proliant ML150, 4 Gig Ram, 6x146Gig SCSI in RAID5 and are running FC4 with 10.0.1 (the latest).

We moved 8 users over as a test, and have found quite a few problems:
- one user, who has 3000 mail in his Inbox tried to access his inbox thru SWA, he gave up after 120 seconds when it didn't display, at this point Internet Explorer locked up and crashed.
- a couple of users using Internet Explorer found that for some reason the icons were all trying to be downloaded individually. This meant the browser had to download the same mail icon 100's of times rather than realising they were the same and just downloading it once.

We would like to move to Scalix, but this SWA performance is a big worry.
Any news on new versions or fixes for these things?
Cheers

n

[florian]

Netpenthe,

not sure if I understand correctly - have you already purchased those seats? If so, it might make sense to open up a Support Case with Scalix Tech Support as you'll have someone working on your case in a dedicated way.

As you can see from my last post, the amount of data you're mentioning is not atypical for Scalix, so that should work fine and certainly finish to load with your SWA.

Curious - you said you test-migrated those users - how did you do that? Depending on what the answer is, you might want to prefill the systems MIME cache for pre-rendered versions of the messages - see the omtidyu -M command for details.

In addition - was this over a LAN? What's the configuration (CPU, RAM) on the Browser client?

Is this Scalix 10 on the server? What memory allocation is available for your Tomcat engine?

Hlope this helps to get started, I'm confident we're going to drill down here.

Thx,
Florian

[jaga0]

I'm also having SWA performance issues. The system is a dual 3ghz xeon with 4 gb of ram connected to an external san. I've run omtidyu -MB on the maiboxes, and I've mounted /var/opt/scalix/temp as a 1GB ramdisk per jch's post in another thread

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mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G,mode=777 tmpfs /var/opt/scalix/temp

Both of these suggestions have helped, but not enough.

What are the proper memory settings for tomcat?