[dijichi2]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "scalable" when the performance is so lacking for an idealised/lightweight user testing scenario. Are you saying the low performance is something that "gets better" because you become more accustomed to it?

i mean typically this slow response is consistent even when you ramp the usage of the server up to many users and very large mailboxes. there are a few steps you can take such as disabling any component or zimlets you don't use.

Trust me, my users are not so forgiving. I handed out some test accounts to the more adventurous users and they all to a man thought the server was hung after 5 seconds and clicked refresh in their browsers. (They're accustomed to sub-second response times for trivial things like logging in/refreshing the inbox, even on the webmail app.) Fine, that's a typical LUSER response, but it's indicative of what I'll be dealing with.

logging in is not a trivial thing with ajax apps. someone else on the forum here did a trace of how much code is downloaded to the client logging in and its huge, well over a meg, and it typically hangs the client while logging and executing all that javascript. however, once logged in most things are very responsive, and doing things like realtime contact searches, mailbox searches etc even of very large mailboxes are fast. it does require education of the users and them to get used to it. some do, love it, and never return to native clients or traditional webmail clients, others hate it and go straight back. as with every other mail server you are of course open to still use whatever client they're used to, including full support for imail and outlook with the connectors. i have in the past used squirremail and horde to provide a familiar interface, most people on my systems use thunderbird.

I'm open to ideas, but I've yet to resolve this performance pathology. Is this to be considered the "baseline", or do I need the new Quad Core 1066MHz 8MB L2 cache FSB CPU with 32GB of DDR2-1066 RAM and a large rack of EMC drives to make this respond the way my existing servers with relatively ancient P4 2.0Ghz (Northwood) CPUs, 2GB of (PC133 no less) RAM, and SCSI-160s (not even RAIDed) do?

i've found the backend makes very little difference, my main system runs on a P3-800Mhz and is pretty much as fast as newer multi-Ghz large ram systems. The client cpu makes a massive difference.