Webmail too slow

Problem reported by Manuel Martins - 5/29/2017 at 1:24 AM

Resolved

Hi,

I upgraded from SmarterMail 15 to 16 and now webmail runs too slow, it was very fast on 15 but now it's not, when i change to another folder, make a search, almost all operations are much slower.

Thanks

39 Replies

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mark Replied

5/29/2017 at 2:04 AM

It is the same by my SM16. The webinterface is very slow.

Shaun Peet Replied

5/29/2017 at 5:27 AM

There have been other threads where the SM team commented that after an upgrade to v16 there's a bunch of background processing happening with the mailboxes that might take some time to complete. That's why we scheduled our upgrade for 8pm Sunday night (last night). Hopefully by this morning (Monday) all that background processing is done.

In any case - for any of the people who had slowness in the webmail in the past couple weeks - has the slowness gone away with time or is it still slow?

We might poll our users as well to find out, but if the slowness is already a known issue we won't bother.

Scarab Replied

5/29/2017 at 11:15 AM

Our customers have been complaining non-stop about how slow the new webmail interface is too.

Although it does seem the slowdown lies in initial load times that are entirely dependent upon the number of objects it has to index and paginate, once a folder is populated it does seem faster than the previous interface v15 and prior (granted "seems" is a relative word).

So we put it to the test and it did become clear that not all web browsers are created equal, especially in concerns with the new webmail interface. Some seem to handle AngularJS & CSS3 better than others. We tested on the same machine, same email account on the latest version of 8 different browsers and this is what we got:

Web Browser	Time To Load	Rank
Vivaldi	713 ms	1
Google Chrome	920 ms	2
Brave	947 ms	3
Opera	979 ms	4
Mozilla Firefox (Linux)	1.93 sec	5
Safari (Mac)	2.38 sec	6
Microsoft Edge	5.93 sec	7
Mozilla Firefox (Win)	7.11 sec	8

For the new Smartermail interface having a modal page loading in 1.93 and 2.38 sec on Firefox (Linux) & Safari (Mac) it is definitely acceptable as that puts it into the Top 50% of fastest websites in 2017, and with Vivaldi it puts it at the Top 6% of websites, with all others but Edge and Firefox on Windows being in the Top 25% for speed, which is definitely a lot faster than the previous version all the way across the board. With Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox on Windows the performance truly is abysmal compared to the old Smartermail webmail interface. (Remember, Firefox for Windows is still 32-bit and single-threaded which may account for the difference, especially when compared to Firefox for Linux which is 64-bit and multi-threaded.)

(Note: I didn't include Mobile Browsers as there would be too many variables causing them to be like comparing apples to oranges except when compared to those on the same OS on the same device...and besides I couldn't figure out how to enable DevTools on most Mobile Browsers.)

TBH, I can live with slower speeds initially as the priority at this point s/b quashing bugs as quickly as possible. I know performance is something that comes in time with optimization. I remember the switch from v7 to v8 in Smartermail, where even though the interface looked the same performance took a significant hit for several months before it was optimized better.

Tim Uzzanti Replied

5/29/2017 at 1:15 PM

Employee Post

In another thread in the community which was discussing load times... lead me to requesting another round of speed testing from our QC team. We have a VERY extensive matrix of 25 different areas in the web application that is being tested with a number of browsers. These tests are done with many gigabyte mailboxes and significant calendars, contacts etc. I have seen some of the results and there are a couple areas of concern. Data is still being compiled.

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

echoDreamz Replied

5/29/2017 at 11:16 PM

What we are seeing as well, response time grows over time. Our PRTG monitor checks response time etc. every minute. First response from a fresh iisreset shows about 20 - 30ms response time. However, as the system runs longer the response time steadily increases. It is not peak times either as you can see from the attached graph, its from 12:45AM until 11:15AM when I did an iisreset, times instantly went down, but began growing once again.

A customer assisted me (without telling him what I was seeing), after I did an iisreset, he said the interface was very nice for about 1.5 - 2 hours, then started saying it he could see it was beginning to slow. Which is what our graphs indicate as well.

https://ibb.co/bzFsAv

echoDreamz Replied

5/29/2017 at 11:20 PM

Does SmarterMail 16 support multiple IIS worker processes yet? I assume just like running a multi-threaded application on a multi-core CPU, having more IIS processes running can help share the love.

Ashkan Nasiri Replied

5/29/2017 at 11:51 PM

We are facing the same issue on our 2000+ Enterprise servers. After upgrading to SM16 the overall performance of webmail have reducing tremendously. The slowness is so much that we are forced to stop the upgrades and stick with 15.x which seems much stable that current SM16

The slowness have been sighted at freshly installed SM16 which is worrying for this smartermail product.

Employee Replied

5/30/2017 at 7:09 AM

Employee Post

There is a 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows. Also if you are on the Windows 10 creators update make sure that you are on the latest Firefox. The creators update and Firefox didn't mix well when it first came out.

PhilabitsAdmin Replied

6/7/2017 at 7:38 AM

Same here , the webmail is really slow after upgrade. we are receiving so many complains about this everyday.
It seems the interface loads so many big files when it load them and cache them it works fine. but again next day users should wait for the content to get cached again.
Is there any update on this ?

PhilabitsAdmin Replied

6/7/2017 at 7:39 AM

it is still really slow. just the webmail interface.

Nathan Replied

6/16/2017 at 1:32 PM

Has the slowness issue been fixed?

Tim Uzzanti Replied

6/16/2017 at 2:06 PM

Employee Post

We keep making incremental improvements with every minor release and why we have been doing them weekly.

Were going to publish an assessment of v15 and v16 (including minors) to show the improvements.

When you install a new version of SmarterMail, new files will be downloaded. After that, they are cached. There was an issue on the original 16.x release that had an issue with caching.

We are still trying to figure out what is causing Firefox to be slow. Were showing no CPU and were seeing no Bandwidth being used but Firefox just sits there dumbfounded. Its random and difficult to diagnose.

Hope this helps,

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

echoDreamz Replied

6/16/2017 at 2:06 PM

Yes and no... We have a few customers who have stated the load times are getting better, and we have another group who said it is still slow(er) than SM 15.

We also extensively tested multiple IIS workers and found the interface to be much snappier, but of course this breaks notifications.

Nathan Replied

6/16/2017 at 2:11 PM

Thanks Christopher, we'll be holding off testing for a while longer.

echoDreamz Replied

6/16/2017 at 2:26 PM

We have noticed that the IIS worker and primary SM service do use less CPU than the initial release of SM 16.

The primary constant in a sea of variables that we are noticing from our customers is that older machines seem to choke on the new interface for whatever reason.

Shaun Peet Replied

6/16/2017 at 2:27 PM

Hi Tim,

I just started playing with an Android phone a few days ago - an LG K4 2017. So that's a mid-range quality device. I have noticed that using the webmail in Chrome on that device has a few styling issues but is also quite sluggish. FWIW I hadn't really noticed significant slowness elsewhere yet. I'm going to keep trying things out over the weekend and attempt to identify anything specific and will post a bug report next week (if needed) so you guys can hopefully enjoy the weekend. I know you and your team has been working hard and we do appreciate it.

Shaun

echoDreamz Replied

6/16/2017 at 2:38 PM

I'd love to see SmarterMail updated to properly support multiple IIS workers. Especially in our environment with thousands of webmail users, and the growing use of EWS / ActiveSync, multiple workers would help spread the load.

amir bijani Replied

6/19/2017 at 2:53 AM

please, when you release update that it resolve the speed issue, like you, we have costumers that we have to answer them why it happens and when it get better!

and what is your plan to solve it?

sales Replied

11/15/2017 at 2:20 PM

any news on this being fixed .. its killing me ... so slowwwww.

Manuel Martins Replied

11/15/2017 at 3:42 PM

Hi, i have a made a downgrade, I'm using SM15 back again... I gave up on SM16 for now...

sales Replied

11/17/2017 at 2:31 PM

made downgrade also . it had to go . interface looks so phoneish which i hate . too much wasted space when on a PC . way to slow.....back on 15.7

sales Replied

11/17/2017 at 2:32 PM

from my experience 15.7 loads login box on firefox in 1 sec .
16.x loads login in about 12 secs...

just horrible .

James Ratliff Replied

2/10/2018 at 7:56 PM

So, what's the deal here?

This thread hasn't been commented upon in forever.

We're still running v.15 but I've been experimenting with v.16 on a test server and webmail is still DOG SLOW particularly when loading for the first time.

I just upgraded to 16.3.6614 and I'm still seeing the same issues.

Is this SUPPOSED to be fixed and if not, is it GOING to be fixed before v.17 is released?

As it stands, there is NO WAY I'm going to upgrade . v.16 with these issues.

Are there any IIS optimizations people can recommend or is this something that can't be resolved without an update?

John Marx Replied

2/12/2018 at 10:17 AM

We are running v16 (latest) and performance is very good. My issue that I have is all related to ActiveSync. My customers are complaining as am I. If that was fixed I would be as happy as I could possibly be with a non-Microsoft email server.

Gabriele Maoret Replied

2/13/2018 at 8:50 AM

We are running v16 from november 2017 and there's no compliant with webmail speed...

For us and our customers, opening an email or browsing through folders using webmail is almost instantaneous...

Manuel Martins Replied

2/13/2018 at 9:27 AM

Have you made some changes to Smartermail or IIS to get it fast ? Almost Everybody complains about V16 slowness, what is you secret ???
Thanks.

Gabriele Maoret Replied

2/13/2018 at 9:43 AM

Fresh installed Windows Server 2016 VM hosted in a Hyper-V Server...

We copied all the files from v.15 from the previous server, then we updated to v.16 and everything works as it should.

Every time an update comes out, we wait 4-5 days to see if there are big BUGs and then upgrade ...

No other secrets

Gabriele Maoret Replied

2/13/2018 at 9:45 AM

OH, that VM is ONLY for SM 16, no other software.

Manuel Martins Replied

2/13/2018 at 9:53 AM

How many domains and mailboxes ?

Gabriele Maoret Replied

2/13/2018 at 10:14 AM

at the moment 43 domains and 157 mailboxes, growing

Gabriele Maoret Replied

2/13/2018 at 10:15 AM

the only slowness is on login, sometimes it is fast, some times 6-8 seconds...

Gabriele Maoret Replied

2/13/2018 at 10:21 AM

If SM 17 will be out with good performance, EXCHANGE support for Outlook and some other enancements, we are planning in the future to migrate all our customers to SM (from Mailenable, Kerio Connect and other...).

Manuel Martins Replied

2/13/2018 at 10:25 AM

82 Domains, 978 mailboxes here. We tried SM16 and we liked it but our clients force us to downgrade back to SM15, they were very unhappy with the slowness of SM16 webmail...

Emmet McGovern Replied

2/13/2018 at 10:54 AM

What kind of hardware are you on Manuel? We're on a dedicated win 2016 with 16 cores and 48GB of ram. We haven't made the jump to SM16 yet. Everyone complains of slowness but no one posts their hardware.

Manuel Martins Replied

2/13/2018 at 11:05 AM

Dedicated Win 2012r2 Server
Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4
Number of cores 8
Number of threads 16
32 GB of RAM DDR4

Scarab Replied

2/13/2018 at 11:48 AM

The responsiveness of v16 is really no longer an issue for us. It definitely had been for the first couple of months after v16 release and our customers absolutely hated it initially because of it. At the time there was no way to rollback so we just stuck with it. However, for the past several months the speed of v16 is mostly on-par or comparable to v15 (larger mailboxes notwithstanding).

And as for hardware we are probably running the poorest configuration out there:

Dedicated Bare-metal Server
Dual Xeon X3450 Quad Cores @ 2.66Ghz
16GB ECC RAM
Win2K8R2 (Still works but not recommended)
6 SATA3 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda HDDs in Raid-10

That is for 2724 users on 300 domains with an average of 548,971 connections per day (and after the performance hit from the Meltdown & Spectre patches we are still looking at 11% average CPU usage, up from 7% avg CPU before, although it may be important to note that Inbound Spam Checks are offloaded to an Incoming Gateway and are only run on Outgoing SMTP).

So, as long as you aren't CPU or I/O limited the current minor release of v16 is more than acceptable speed-wise (and given time the interface has grown on our customers and our staff). The only time we have seen degraded webmail performance recently has been due to one of the following:

1. Accounts with 15GB+ of email in a single folder. Webmail performance for extreme accounts has improved dramatically in the past several months but is still painfully apparent, especially when scrolling.
2. Corrupted folders (which seems to be happening far more commonly the past couple of months but a REBUILD FOLDER on the slow folder immediately resolves the issue...which in fairness this may be a localized issue due to our hardware and volume though)
3. Caching issues resolved by a CTRL+F5 in the customer's browser.

There is no secret configuration required. It's definitely been a long, arduous journey with v16 but other than one issue (okay, maybe two) involving Incoming Gateways we've finally become happy with where it is today.

Matt Petty Replied

2/13/2018 at 12:06 PM

Employee Post

Server/Client network speeds and quality can have a major impact with the perception of slowness. As everything is API driven from a front end client, being on a slow or laggy network will make interacting with things appear slow. Initial startup times for new users or after updates also has an effect, since the client has to download nearly 2mb worth of front-end css/javascript code before the login page can render, note this used to be a lot more, almost 7-8mb! However, as we've been optimizing code for the front-end as well as side-loading some assets while on the login page, the initial download "cost" is down to ~2mb, and trust us we've been trying to reduce that even more but the front-end frameworks we use, use a vast majority of that 2mb.

Matt Petty Senior Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Matt Petty Replied

2/13/2018 at 12:09 PM

Employee Post

As far as CPU/Memory goes, 16 should be faster as we've consolidated many things and improved backend. Unfortunately, your clients don't see this side of things, only what they see. Which is the frontend and based heavily on quality of network.

Matt Petty Senior Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Emmet McGovern Replied

2/13/2018 at 12:12 PM

Thanks, that helps. Scarab, while your hardware isn't similar to us, your usage is. This leaves me a little more confidant in planning an upgrade.

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