How big is your calendar's .json file?

Question asked by James North - 8/28/2024 at 7:46 AM

Answered

I've got one user on my mail server with ~3,500 appointments in their calendar. The .json file for the calendar is 67MB. There's a warning that the file should be under 15MB or it will cause performance problems. The .json file used to be about 130MB, but I deleted a few thousand appointments.

Short of manually sorting older appointments into multiple new folders to keep individual size down or deleting old appointments, there's not really much I can do to get it any smaller.

So I'm curious if anyone else has a large calendar and whether they have an oversized .json file to go with it?

To check, with a Linux server, you go to /var/lib/smartermail/Domains/domain.tld/Users/username and check the file sizes of all your folder*.json files with:

ls -lah

To check which folder is which, run less on the folders.json file. Then search for "Calendar" and check the "id" in that block. That'll give you the filename of the .json file for the folder named "Calendar".

To check how many appointments you have, I recommend using jless to examine the .json file. It's performant even on huge .json files and you can quickly collapse everything to tell how many entries there are.

Has anyone got more than 4000 appointments? How big is your .json file?

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Sébastien Riccio Replied

8/28/2024 at 9:57 AM

We also have some users with >15MB json files (big calendars). It creates warning but I'm not sure it has a real performance impact though.

You can set calendar autoclean to 12 month or so it cleans old entries, but some customers might want to keep the history of their appointments for more than 1 year.

Using another format for storing calendar items could be an idea, but it should be a format that we can open/read without proprietary tools (not like .sbin files for example). Maybe SQLite DBs. Not sure it would be performing better than raw json files though.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Tim Uzzanti Replied

8/28/2024 at 2:13 PM

Employee Post Marked As Answer

It's not the file format; it's the overall resources required to manage tons of calendars. Calendars and appointments are the most complex areas in SmarterMail due to factors like time zones, iCal.NET, recurring events (with endless options), reminders, organizer and attendee tracking, sharing, and more. Calendars need constant processing and demand significant CPU and memory.

Limits on calendars exist in all products. It's a bit easier to handle processing on the client side, but at the server level across 20,000 users, it requires substantial resources. We handle it better than most, but it's advisable to impose limits on your users across all areas of SmarterMail. To ensure the best uptime and performance, and to prevent one user from impacting all users, consider suggesting some auto-clean options.

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Oliver Replied

8/28/2024 at 2:31 PM

Hello Tim,

sorry it's a bit off topic.

But since you mention here that you should limit your users where possible, I would like to address the point again that I can set per user how large the sent/received mails may be. Unfortunately, this can currently only be set for the entire domain.

Regards

Oliver

Tim Uzzanti Replied

8/29/2024 at 7:42 AM

Employee Post

I will add this into our feature request system.

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

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