Performance Issues with Single User

[soxfan]

Looking for some suggestions here. I've got a user who has been complaining the last week or so about "painfully slow" (her words, or perhaps a paraphrase) performance with Zimbra using the Web Client. She is one of our most active email users, both in terms of the number of messages she receives (300+ daily) and the size of her mailbox (~3.5 GB). She has a large number of folders nested beneath the Inbox (75+), and some of these have folders nested below them. Her laptop is not top of the line, but the specs are certainly in-line with our other users. Her description of the problem is that things start off OK at the beginning of the day, but progressively get worse as the day goes along. She is using IE7 to access the web client, as are just about all our other users.

I found one thread (slow load times, sluggish), which I actually responded to at the time, that is somewhat similar to my issue. This thread seemed to suggest that having a large number of folders directly in the root folder (same level as Inbox) was bad, but if that is the case then my user has things setup the "right way".

Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts or suggestions on things to look for and try as far as getting better performance for this user. The server load still looks OK to me, so at this point anyway I'm pointing toward an issue with her mailbox. Although she is in the top ten for my installation in terms of mailbox size, I don't think 3.5 GB is ridiculously large, and I'm sure there are other installations out there that have much larger mailboxes. I am concerned about the sheer number of messages she handles, the number of folders and sub-folders she has, and that actions she takes in moving messages around. However, at this point I don't really have any great suggestions for her.

TIA,
John

[soxfan]

Just wanted to add that I ran the re-index process on the mailbox in question and the user is reporting that it seems "much faster". However it is early yet, so we will see if this is the answer or not.

Does anyone have any suggestions on "best practices" regarding folders/sub-folders? Is it better to have them at the root level (same as Inbox) or as sub-folders below the Inbox? Also, do multiple nests help or hurt performance?

Thanks again,
John

[LMStone]

Originally Posted by soxfan

Looking for some suggestions here. I've got a user who has been complaining the last week or so about "painfully slow" (her words, or perhaps a paraphrase) performance with Zimbra using the Web Client. She is one of our most active email users, both in terms of the number of messages she receives (300+ daily) and the size of her mailbox (~3.5 GB). She has a large number of folders nested beneath the Inbox (75+), and some of these have folders nested below them. Her laptop is not top of the line, but the specs are certainly in-line with our other users. Her description of the problem is that things start off OK at the beginning of the day, but progressively get worse as the day goes along. She is using IE7 to access the web client, as are just about all our other users.

I found one thread (slow load times, sluggish), which I actually responded to at the time, that is somewhat similar to my issue. This thread seemed to suggest that having a large number of folders directly in the root folder (same level as Inbox) was bad, but if that is the case then my user has things setup the "right way".

Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts or suggestions on things to look for and try as far as getting better performance for this user. The server load still looks OK to me, so at this point anyway I'm pointing toward an issue with her mailbox. Although she is in the top ten for my installation in terms of mailbox size, I don't think 3.5 GB is ridiculously large, and I'm sure there are other installations out there that have much larger mailboxes. I am concerned about the sheer number of messages she handles, the number of folders and sub-folders she has, and that actions she takes in moving messages around. However, at this point I don't really have any great suggestions for her.

TIA,
John

FWIW, my mailbox is bigger with a greater number folders, I get 600-1,000 emails per day and I use Zimbra mostly on an old 1.6GHz laptop. My mailbox I keep on one of our hosted servers with clients' mailboxes (we eat our own dogfood) with more than 250 mailboxes of users who typically send/receive several hundred emails per day.

I don't ever see a slowdown EXCEPT when I am at a client site and someone is hogging the network bandwidth, or when I am in the office and one of our engineers is doing something to hog the pipe.

What's the bandwidth at the user's site? How good is the backbone of switches and cabling?

It could be as simple as a pinched patch cable, but if nothing has changed on the server end of things I would start looking at the client side.

Hope that helps,
Mark