Runbox is running faster

After doing some tuning to our central database yesterday we have been able to increase the speed of all our email services significantly.

This is especially noticeable when using the Webmail, but email clients using IMAP and POP should also be faster.

This was made possible because Runbox is a database accelerated email system, where all basic message data is stored in a central database. This means that our various services don’t have to open any actual files on the storage units to display folder contents. Only when a message is opened do the services access the message files themselves.

We’d be interested in hearing if Runbox is running faster for you. Meanwhile we’ll continue working to improve the performance of our services!

6 thoughts on “Runbox is running faster”

  1. I hope that you chose a more modern document-based database, such as MongoDB, instead of a more legacy relationship database, such as MySQL. Not only would you see tremendous performance improvements, but you’d be able to start much larger documents out of the box, which would be important for some large emails.

    Implementing memory-based caching, such as Redis, instead of relying 100% on a single database platform, would also bring tremendous performance improvements.

    I also hope that you have slave databases setup in the event that your “central” database has a bad day.

    I’m super glad to see that Runbox has set a high bar of excellence. This is very important to me, as I share that simple principle in my business. But I also recognize that the pursuit of excellence means changing things, which can lead to problems. So I applaud you for accepting that challenge.

    1. Thanks for the feedback. We have not changed our database software and are still running MySQL. It has the features we need, especially as we only store message metadata in the database — the messages themselves are kept in files.

  2. Typos…

    “relationship” should be “relational”
    “start much larger” should be “store much larger”.
    “share that simple principle” should be “share that same principle”

    Serves me right for typing too fast. 🙂

  3. The webmail speed increase is very noticable when you have > 100 mails to display in the inbox. Had a “WTF happened here?” experience over it yesterday 🙂
    It’s most appreciated!
    BR Henrik

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