Yesterday I spent some time evaluating the Open Source version of SugarCRM, since the salespeople at work wants to see if a CRM can help them.

I installed an extension called ZuckerMail to allow reading of mail stored on our IMAP server, and was irritated by the long time it took to get the list of mail, or to read a single mail.

I did some strace:ing, but that didn’t help very much - it only revealed the fact that something was waiting for 10 seconds. A process listing however revealed that there was several rsh procesess trying to contact the IMAP server. Also, my firewall’s log had blocked several connection attempts from this machine to the IMAP server on port 22 (ssh).

Aha.. but why!

It turns out that the IMAP library for PHP is built on top of the ancient c-client library from the UW IMAP. If you’re trying to make an connection without explicitly telling it that you want to connect with ssl (something the GUI for configuring the connection did not have an option for - only STARTTLS, which is another thing), the c-client library tries to run rimapd on the host via rsh. There is a /usr/bin/rsh on the machine, linked to /usr/bin/ssh via /etc/alternatives (Debian sarge).

You can turn this behaviour off in a configuration file for c-client. I solved the problem a bit more drastically - by removing /usr/bin/rsh. This made all IMAP operations go much faster.