Hi Dermot,
We were running Imail 8.03 on Windows 2000, with problems, then moved to
Windows 2003 when we got our new hardware. We experienced the exact same
problems that you encountered, only ipswitch tech support didn't say much
about why or even acknowledge the issue ("it's your network card, or your
dns, or blah blah blah"). I would recommend to everyone not to migrate their
production mail servers to the 2003 Server until ipswitch has acknowledged
the problems and has patched them. Additionally, it is becoming clear that
Imail is not powerful enough to handle a large amount of virtual domains (on
windows 2000 or 2003), we've even had some ipswitch tech guys imply that it
was too much.
We have since moved back to Windows 2000, and are experiencing the same
occasional server crashes.
Ryan Bohn
Sys Admin & Tech Support
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dermot Keenan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 11:03 AM
Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Webmail Performance
Ryan, what OS are you running IMail on? We had a similar configuration -
dual 2.4GHz Xeon with 2.5GB RAM running Windows Server 2003, IMail 8.03,
3000+ virtual hosts. Originally we had IMail running on a dual Pentium III
933MHz with 1GB RAM and the OS was Windows 2000 Server. We moved IMail to
this server in hopes of solving a few problems:
1) The server simply crashes every so often (by "crash" I mean it becomes
completely unresponsive). The only recourse being a cold reboot. We have
found no clues as to the cause of these crashes.
2) SMTPD32 seems to get bogged down when too much email is coming in
(between 50,000 and 100,000 messages a day usually means at least one or two
crashes).
After moving to this new, more powerful server we had HUGE problems. When I
opened the IMail Administrator it would take hours (yes, I said hours) to
load the entire tree view of the virtual hosts. SMTPD slowed down to a
crawl. It would take so long just to process a single incoming message that
SMTPD became unavailable to almost all incoming mail while it tried to
proceess the few that it had already received. Ipswitch tech support
acknowledged a problem with the way IMail reads the user database from the
Windows registry. They said it was a problem with Windows 2003 Server and
that there was nothing they could do about it. Too bad they don't mention
anything about this on their website where they say that IMail is supported
on Window 2003 Server.
Needless to say, we rolled back to the old configuration and did our best to
deal with the enormous backlog of mail that resulted from this disaster. We
are still experiencing the frequent crashes but at least it is better than
not receiving mail at all! Unlike you however, the one thing that we don't
seem to have a problem with is WebMail. Go figure! I am now waiting for
one of Ipswitch's tech support reps to take a hands-on look at our server.
I'm sorry if this little story doesn't help with your situation. I think it
is relevant though. Anyone who is hosting a large number of virtual mail
hosts as we are should be aware that there is a serious problem with IMail
running on Windows 2003 Server.
Dermot
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Ryan Bohn
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 12:45 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] Webmail Performance
I am running into the same problem as Rick and Chris when it comes to the
very poor webmail performance. I do agree with Rick that ipswitch seems to
have ignored this issue.
What makes it look very bad is that my server is a dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz with 1
GB of ram, and yet webmail sucks. I believe the flaw exists in the webmail
software itself, it just isn't written well. I will often see the service
consuming 70% of the cpu's, and it was just started, hardly any users on it.
To top it off, we've noticed that imail's other services (smtp, queue
manager, pop, etc) are cpu hogs as well. We have about 5000 domains on
imail, and it had been running fine without incident on a single 1.4 Ghz cpu
machine for a long time, then we upgraded to 7.3 then to 8 and 8.3 and since
then the performance of the services has hit rock bottom, forcing the server
change to the dual xeon's.
We have made many calls to ipswitch over the past week, and they continue to
attribute it to things that don't make sense, they seem to be making up
excuses for it and can't resolve the core issue. We have found out very
quickly that ipswitch has become irrelevant, unable, and unwilling to
provide quality support.
We are looking into migrating to other mail server software.
Ryan Bohn
Sys Admin & Tech Support
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick Leske" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 9:08 AM
Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Webmail Performance
Could you be a little more specific.. what server hardware/configuration is
it running on? Any other server services running in conjunction with
IMail.. what is your internet bandwidth (at the server). Is it a client
concern or is the server actually running slow?
~Rick
> This is a far more serious problem than Ipswitch has given attention
> too. After numerous calls to support and many messages here I still do
> not have a solution to this. I have tried many things and seen no
> solution to this at all for months now. we had version 5.x which would
> load messages in seconds, but 7.x and 8.x is almost unusable for us.
>
>
> C> Hello List
> C> I have just subscribed, so if this query has been aired
> recently, please
> C> accept my apologies.
>
> C> I am running IMail Server v8.3, and the webmail is incredibly
> slow. Does
> C> anyone have any tips or tricks to speed it up?
>
>
To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
