Jeff,
Some information from some one experienced with IMail and Samba:
I'm wondering if part of the problem is the Samba usage. If the SPOOL
directory is remote, it will cause S_I_G_N_I_F_I_C_A_N_T reductions
in performance. Even having the mailbox files there can really hurt
performance.
NOTE: I used Samba in the past-- well, I used it occasionally to store
archives, etc. It was too slow to be used for interactive use. Granted, it
was a generation or two older than current revisions, and I understand that
Samba has been enhanced since then, but IMail needs real-time control of
files for peak performance, especially in the SPOOL directory.
I don't know if this will SOLVE Jeff's problem, but I think he will see some
benefits if he adds a local disk.
---------------------------
Since this comes from someone who'se knowledge of IMail is at least as great
as mine (and maybe greater in some significant aspects), I would recommend
following it.
In my experience, anything that slows IMails access to disk files, will
affect its performance. That start/stop of the service usually restores
operations, could be a confirmation of the effect. The test that I would
use, might be to use Telnet and connect to SMTP service when this is
happening. If it is 'slower' than normal or shows the last number as being
greater than say 10-15, or it increases only, that would indicate that
something is keeping IMail from completing processes in a normal manner.
I did have one user who had setup NT Auditing and SMTP got real slow and the
current number of connections did not seem to go down anywhere near as fast
as it went up. Clearing the Audit logs would restore normal operation. Turns
out that NT was getting a big Queue of tasks and taking longer to complete.
Clearing the log, caused that to become more reasonable (guess as the log
file grew, it took longer and longer to update) and IMail went back to
normal operations. This is not to say that you too might have this problem,
only to illustrate that any thing that slows IMails communication with the
Data, will affect its perfromance, sometimes greatly!
Daniel Donnelly
________________________________________________________
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Knight" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2000 7:24 PM
Subject: [IMail Forum] Services stalling out
> Hello,
>
> Background: I am running iMail 6.05 on NT 4 sp6a. PII 450, 128 MB ram,
4+
> GB free on an 8 GB SCSI drive. The mail files themselves are being stored
> via a SAMBA share on a Linux box via a UNC address.
>
> Often, 2 -5 times each day all the service seem to die on the mail server.
> POP3 sessions stall, Web messaging sits for 10-15 minutes trying to login.
> Those are the services that are the most noticeable. There is less than
10%
> CPU usage at this time and less than 60 MB of memory being used.
>
> Stopping all services in Imail administrator and restarting the ones I
need
> SMTP, POP3, IMAP, IMONITOR, PSERVE, WEB, etc seems to work for a few hours
> but I usually end up having to reboot the box.
>
> I recently doubled the Virtual Memory to 256 MB which seemed to help for
> about 2 weeks. But the problem is back.
>
> Has anyone dealt with this sort of thing before ? I could use some
advice.
>
> Jeff Knight
> INFOWEST
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
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