Re: [Nmh-workers] IMAP/nmh, again

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ken,

> I'd be interested why this variance occurs.  You would think for the
> same mailbox it would always be the same.

The tests with that public IMAP server are presumably accessing content
that it has readily to hand, e.g. in RAM.  I suspect a lot of commercial
IMAP servers, e.g. what comes thrown in with one's broadband connection,
are over-subscribed so there's a bit of competition for whose Maildir
dirents, and mail itself, sits in RAM.

MUAs are pulling in the background a lot of the time so IMAP doesn't
need to be nippy in the eyes of the suppliers, e.g. like interactive
SSH?  Also, my ISP shapes traffic, putting "email" in the middle bucket.
It's probably not alone.

I see Dovecot on a remote server sometimes takes a few seconds to scan a
large Maildir folder when triggered by a login;  dstat(1) shows it's
waiting for I/O from the SSD.

Your large Gmail test will be interesting.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy