slow load times, sluggish...

[NoDoze]

I have a user who is reporting issues with the Web Client. Pages don't load completely, browser error messages. They use IE7, on a 3.0Ghz, 2GB Ram, 80GB HD WinXP PC.

The server is a Quad Core, Dual Core 2Ghz, with 4GB Ram, running CentOS 5.x, with Dual GB nics bonded round robin. Has two 750GB HDs in RAID 1.

The server only has 35 email accounts. Ranging from 10MB to 3.7GB in size. The user in question has the largest email account at 3.7GBs.

The network is 1GB

My questions...
- Is this occuring because of the large email account at 3.7GB? Is there any limit on performance with large accounts?
- Is the cause IE7? Should I have the user try Firefox? Seams ajax works better in firefox?
- is there a way to optimize the email server, so it runs more efficient?

Any info is helpful...

Thanks!

[soxfan]

I would say give Firefox a try. It's kind of hard to quantify "sluggish". What one person thinks is horribly slow may be acceptable for someone else. I don't think the large mailbox size has anything to do with the slow load times, but I could be wrong.

Check back on the Zimbra blogs. Recently there was a "Browser War" series. You should definitely see better performance with Firefox and I'd recommend going with FF3.

[mmorse]

And The Winner of the Browser Wars is…. » Zimbra :: Blog

Browser War - Part 1: Firefox2 vs Firefox3RC1 » Zimbra :: Blog
Browser War - Part 2: IE7 vs IE8b » Zimbra :: Blog
Browser War - Part 3: Safari 3.1.1 & Nightlies » Zimbra :: Blog

[NoDoze]

Maybe this will help quantify "sluggish"...

- When accessing a new page, it'll take 10-20 seconds to complete loading.
- When clicking sent on an email, adding an appointment, completing a contact, occasionally IE7 you get error/send report messages, and in Firefox buttons menus are just missing.

I'm questioning the user with the large email box because 80% of the time this "sluggish" is occurring with this user.

[webman]

I would try logging on as various different users on the same computer and on different browsers. Record your results (load times) so you can compare and hopefully eliminate the user/browser/computer.

[Bill Brock]

I have some users that simply can't use IE6 because the site loads so slow and then after logging in it gets worse. IE7 seems to work acceptably but is slow. Firefox seems to load just fine. All clients use Ajax and not standard HTML version.

IE6 seemed to work acceptably when I first upgraded to 5.0.6 but performance seems to have degraded.

Fortunately I have control over the browsers being used and have been forced to put IE6 users on Firefox. Frustrating.

[soxfan]

Originally Posted by Bill Brock

I have some users that simply can't use IE6 because the site loads so slow and then after logging in it gets worse. IE7 seems to work acceptably but is slow. Firefox seems to load just fine. All clients use Ajax and not standard HTML version.

IE6 seemed to work acceptably when I first upgraded to 5.0.6 but performance seems to have degraded.

Fortunately I have control over the browsers being used and have been forced to put IE6 users on Firefox. Frustrating.

Yeah, we haven't used IE6 since the Zimbra 4.0/4.5 days, but it was horribly slow back then. So slow, in fact, that we almost cancelled/postponed our Zimbra implementation because of it. Fortunately upgrading to IE7 helped out a lot. Unfortunately I don't have complete control over the browser being used. I'd love to "upgrade" everyone to Firefox. I use FF myself and have rarely, if ever, had any performance issues, even on slower hardware.

A couple of other things I thought of for the OP. If your users, particularly your "problem" user, are using any type of proxy server to access the Internet I would recommend bypassing it for the Zimbra server, if possible. Also are you using http or https to access the Zimbra server? I've found https slower, especially depending on what type of link you have back to the server (ie LAN, WAN, VPN, etc.).

[y@w]

I'm not sure if this is your situation, but we've seen these kind of problems when a user has a very large number of folders to load. One user in particular had a couple hundred folders right in the root of their mailbox and the page took a really long time to load. When we had the user nest folders the pages loaded much faster. The size of the mailbox didn't seem to affect it, but the number of folders slowed things down.

[DEREKB]

just to add a stat. We have a customer with 45 accounts and large mailboxes. one mailbox is 6.5 Gb. FOSS version 5.01

server has 2 Gb ram and scsi hard disk. Accessing it over standard 2 MB broadband connection and browser speed is excellent. Just as good as if it were on local LAN.

I too would check network path from client to server. Check for firewall rules, proxy servers etc.

Have you tried accessing the same troublesome account from another computer ?

[NoDoze]

All my comments are based over a LAN network. 1GB and switches with 48GB backplanes.

...no firewalls, no proxy, just user -> switch -> server and back again...