[Dovecot] Re: extremely slow delete/move operations?

[Michael Renner]

Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <gkra <at> ucsd.edu> writes:

> 
> I've been working to migrate several hundered users on to our new mail 
> servers, which run dovecot 0.99.11 (RHEL4).  The problem I'm seeing is that 
> deleting or moving a message seems to take a very long time.  It's not 
> uncommon for Thundirbird (1.0.7) to have delays of 5-10 seconds to delete a 
> single message from my Inbox (<500k) and place it in my Trash folder (~100MB 
> right now).

The size of the directory as a whole doesn't matter, the amount of files can
cause problems (with certain filesystems).

> What's really bugging me is that I've used the same software (RHEL4 and 
> dovecot 0.9x.x) at my last workplace, and the performance was outstanding; 
> it beat UWIMAPd hands-down, especially with large mailboxes.  Here, the 
> opposite seems to be true.  The primary difference seems to be that we're 
> using NFS here, but I wasn't using NFS at my last job.

NFS can be a real performance killer, but to be sure I'd strace (with -tt) a
dovecot process and check where it spends most of it's time.

best regards,
Michael Renner