slow message loading on 0.3.1 and 0.4

[nullspace]

I had been happy with 0.2.2 for quite some time, but 0.4 finally had enough new bells and whistles that I decided to give it a try.  Unfortunately, I found that the message-switching performance was quite a bit slower.  Clicking around in a folder and waiting for the messages to load seemed much slower.  To make sure it wasn't my memory playing tricks on me, I went back and pulled the 0.2.2 revision and set up another database for it on the same server, and sure enough, it was as fast as I remembered.

To see roughly where the problem came in, I also pulled 0.3.1 and installed it, and it's also slow.  0.3.1 and 0.4 both take about 2.5 seconds to show a message in the preview pane after selecting it in a mailbox.  0.2.2, meanwhile, only takes a little less than a second.  This affects the 'snappy' feel of the interface quite severely, really bringing down the user experience.

Has anyone else seen this slowdown in 0.3 and 0.4?  If not, what can I do to troubleshoot this problem?  I'm running the stock configuration in all cases (no extra plugins), on a server that's not close to it's processor and memory limits.  I'm running Apache 2.2, dovecot 1.1.5 and MySQL 5.0.67.  Again, the configuration shouldn't have much to do with it, as I'm testing all versions on the same server.  I'm happy to provide more info as needed to help with this.

[SKaero]

It seems faster to me, check out the performance guide Howto_Performance ? Roundcube Webmail You should also upgrade to RoundCube 0.4.2 a lot of performance fix's where added.

[alec]

Messages displaying performance has been improved in svn-trunk version.

[nullspace]

Messages displaying performance has been improved in svn-trunk version.

Are you talking about displaying individual messages, or the list of messages?  And when were these improvements added?  I installed svn-trunk about a week or two ago (didn't make a note of the exact revision) and it still seemed slow.

It seems faster to me, check out the performance guide Howto_Performance ? Roundcube Webmail You should also upgrade to RoundCube 0.4.2 a lot of performance fix's where added.

I misspoke (-typed?) when I listed 0.4.  I had 0.4.2 installed, with no luck.

I've also already read through the performance tuning page you linked to.  It's got some good suggestions on it, but the great majority of the suggestions (if not all) apply to 0.2.2 as well as 0.4.2.  I have both 0.4.2 and 0.2.2 configured in the same way, and 0.2.2 definitely loads messages faster.

Additionally, a lot of the performance tuning has to do with getting the list of messages to display quickly when changing mailboxes/folders.  I'm just talking about switching messages in the preview pane once the message list is already displayed.  As such, most of those tuning suggestions aren't relevant to my problem (though they're good ideas in general).

Since it seems that at least some other people are seeing 0.4.2 be faster than (or as fast as) 0.2.2, are there any good ways for me to find out where the slowdown is in my install?

One further clarification: I'm running everything on the same server as the IMAP server.  I didn't explicitly state that before.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

[nullspace]

I just pulled trunk (rev 4248 ) and it's still slow to display individual messages.

[alec]

Enable imap_debug, maybe logs will say exactly what is slow. What IMAP server?

[alec]

And what you mean is "slow", a second or more? Is this happen for all messages or maybe for unseen only? Are you talking about the preview pane or about the fullpage view of a message?

[nullspace]

Enable imap_debug, maybe logs will say exactly what is slow. What IMAP server?

I'll try this.  IMAP server is dovecot 1.1.5.

And what you mean is "slow", a second or more? Is this happen for all messages or maybe for unseen only? Are you talking about the preview pane or about the fullpage view of a message?

'Slow' is about 2.5 seconds to show a message in the preview pane after clicking on it in the message list.  This happens for all messages, not just unseen (I have caching turned off, since the IMAP server is the same machine.  Turning it on makes no difference.).  With 0.2.2, it takes less than a second to display a selected message in the preview pane.

[nullspace]

I spent some quality time analyzing the page with Firebug, and it looks like the issue is caused by some of the many javascript changes implemented when switching to jQuery back in the 0.3 revision.  Firebug has a tool that analyzes what the browser is doing as it loads a page and shows you how long it spent on each task.

I'm running Firefox 4.0b7 on a pretty powerful machine running WinXP.  I haven't modified any of the Firefox configuration options that relate to the network.  (FWIW, I see similar results on FF 3.6 on my Mac at home)  For my benchmark, I loaded up the version of Roundcube that I was testing, cleared the 'Net' panel's results in Firebug, and then switched between two small email messages that only contained text.  I'm just selecting the message in the message list, getting the message to display in the preview pane.

Here are results typical of what I get on RC v0.2.2:


As you can see, the message loads in about half a second.

Here are two sets of results typical of what I see from RC 0.3.1, 0.4.2 and svn-trunk (rev 4248 ):



The pinkish portion of the timeline is 'blocking,' which is defined by Firebug as "time spent in a browser queue waiting for a network connection." (from the Firebug documentation.  Clearly, something is going on there which makes the page load 3-4x slower.