RE: [IMail Forum] Woes with stability & connectivity.

[Madscientist]

Well, this configuration has been highly stable except for this recent episode where we experienced some significant packet losses, and a few previous episodes concerning dial-in customers.   CPU is generally under 4% (Idling really) unless a large mailing is going out and then it will only peak at around 65%.   As for DNS, we're still running a 4x version of BIND, but it too has been stable and suits our needs (I know we should upgrade, but we haven't had that project get high enough on the priority list.) Loads from DNS are extremely low as this is one of two authoritative servers, both of which sit behind a resolver.   Memory is more than 70% available, and once a few minutes has gone by after startup, there are no perceivable delays in processing.   The note was really concerned with the instability we experienced while we were having connectivity problems. The reason I picked on Email about this at all is that the instability persisted for more than 40 minutes after our connectivity issues were resolved, and they disappeared once the server was bounced.   I suspect that partially completed SMTP sessions were causing deadlock conditions and/or some other similar conditions were present that would prevent users from uploading new outgoing email... perhaps due to authentication, however I doubt that.   Authentication on our mail server is still the default Email user list. This is possible because we have so few users/domains, so we have kept things as simple as possible. No need to take on the chaos I've read about on this list regarding SQL authentication etc.   Hope this clears things up. Thanks for your response. _M -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Jonathan Waldchen Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 3:03 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] Woes with stability & connectivity. Well it sounds similar to the problems we were having till we migrated IMAIL to it's own server and switched from Imail DB to SQL. I think all of our DNS requests and Imail requests took the servers "breath away" quite frequently.(we were running a PII 500mhz w/ 256MB and NT4.0 sp6a) Now that we have dedicated machines there hasn't been any problems(knock on wood). What DNS are you running? How much free/used memory and CPU utilization do you see under the Performance Manager?    Jonathan   ----- Original Message ----- From: Madscientist To: IMail_Forum@list. ipswitch. com Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 2:34 PM Subject: [IMail Forum] Woes with stability & connectivity. Hello folks, Just a few notes for folks who _might_ be in the same boat.   We're running the latest version of IMail on NT4/SP6A... P2/550, 256MB ram. about 20 domains. Box doubles as a DNS server.   When experiencing trouble with connectivity, IMail becomes highly unstable and begins blocking users from sending mail. Users running Outlook, or Outlook Express. Connected Via T1.   Fix: Once the connectivity problem has ended, restart Client's O/OE. Bounce the server. This will generally fix the problem, but the server will be slow for about 3 minutes while it "catches it's breath". I believe that "catching it's breath" is associated with getting all of the needed DLLs loaded, and quiescing the memory allocations for all of the running programs/services.   Hope this helps, _M   P.S. This instability may be in part to blame for trouble you have with dial-up customers. We have anecdotal evidence to this effect.