Cambridge University C based Webmail Package

[Daniel Watts]

Just came across this and thought you might be interested to see some of
the ideas they have implmemented.

http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/

Of note:

- Uses persistent connections to IMAP server and support servers.

- Target folders remain SELECTed: not a simple-minded proxy.

- Full caching (including sort/thread cache) for each open folder.

- Directory cache: single round trip to IMAP server for directory listing.

- Currently supporting 130,000 logins/day on a fairly idle P4 system
(7,700 logins/hour, 5000 concurrent logins peak, load average: 0.25).

- Aggressive HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 connection caching to reduce SSL overhead:
quite happily handles 3.9 million page hits a day (2.8 million https) on
the above hardware, where 65% are dynamically generated pages.

Note that Prayer is:
"Written entirely in C as HTTP to IMAP Gateway. No scripting languages."

So it is somewhat different to Squirrelmail but is there any scope to
implement some of their Persistence ideas at all to increase performance?

Daniel


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[Paul Lesniewski]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 5:17 AM, Daniel Watts <d@...> wrote:

> Just came across this and thought you might be interested to see some of
> the ideas they have implmemented.
>
> http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/
>
> Of note:
>
> - Uses persistent connections to IMAP server and support servers.
>
> - Target folders remain SELECTed: not a simple-minded proxy.
>
> - Full caching (including sort/thread cache) for each open folder.
>
> - Directory cache: single round trip to IMAP server for directory listing.
>
> - Currently supporting 130,000 logins/day on a fairly idle P4 system
> (7,700 logins/hour, 5000 concurrent logins peak, load average: 0.25).
>
> - Aggressive HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 connection caching to reduce SSL overhead:
> quite happily handles 3.9 million page hits a day (2.8 million https) on
> the above hardware, where 65% are dynamically generated pages.
>
> Note that Prayer is:
> "Written entirely in C as HTTP to IMAP Gateway. No scripting languages."
>
> So it is somewhat different to Squirrelmail but is there any scope to
> implement some of their Persistence ideas at all to increase performance?

While it is conceivable to make a PHP daemon that stays resident, this
is simply not how PHP is designed to work/be used out of the box,
especially considering that one of SM's goals is to remain simple and
easy to install on basic machines that only have IMAP/HTTP(PHP)
servers.  This is exactly the problem that the imapproxy project
solves.  I don't think SM will ever be changed in this manner.

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