[PLUG] Email server performance

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Fri Apr 15 20:02:29 UTC 2005


On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 12:00:02PM -0700, plug-request at lists.pdxlinux.org wrote:
> 
> Hi All, I am having some email server performance issues. Users report
> that the performance is horribly slow. I have witnessed this poor
> performance. It is only horribly slow during business hours, when
> everyone is using it. There are about 180 users who mostly use imap to
> access email. The machine seems to have plenty of processing power, 4
> Zeons and 4 gigs of ram. 

There seems to be a heck of a lot of spam activity and related smtp
activity out there in recent weeks.  Perhaps some group has launched
an email DOS attack on the planet.  My mail logs are 40 times longer 
than they were in September.  In fact, yesterday they filled /var/log
and I spent hours checking for a system break-in before deciding it
was just spam volume, exacerbated by all those "low memory in /var/log"
messages filling /var/log/messages.

Look at the length of your mail logs, and compare them to the sizes
in the backups back when things were "OK".   If they are much bigger,
you may want to talk to consultant Brian Martin about setting up
greylisting, or consultant Randal Schwartz about filtering ports.

General question for others:  Does logging get slower as the files
get bigger?  Does IMAP access also touch the mail logs?

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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