You sound I/O bound... Check the output of iostat (or the equivalent for
BSD if they don't have that... sar maybe??) Server mode, which you are
using, only saves on I/O when the user is either leaving all mail on the
server, or deleting all mail from the server for all other transaction
types, a temp drop file is written to disk. I think one cost effective
thing to try is to use the temp-drop-dir flag at compile to force it to
write it's temp files to another disk on a different controller. If
you're still I/O bound after that, I'd look into hashing the spool
directories and putting them on different disks/controllers as well.
More memory will also help buffer the filesystem. Don't let anyone sell
you more CPU, though, as the load average is high because it's waiting
on I/O. Of course there is also a lot of social engineering that would
help you as well... quotas, forced deletes, periodic purging...
-Joel
Joseph Peterson wrote:
>
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> I'm running a FreeBSD 4.1-RELEASE on a Dell Poweredge 2400 PIII
> 866mhz, 256Meg of RAM and a MegaRAID array (amrd0) with qpopper
> v3.0.2 in inetd mode compiled with servermode. Some of my customers
> get rather large emails (beyond 50 or 80meg each) making their
> mailfile 150 or more. When they go to check mail our load average
> spikes from 0.09 to 7.?? and above sometimes as much as 20.?? or
> 30.?? if several people are doing this at once. Also I have another
> copy of qpopper compiled without servermode for use by our web-based
> interface (Endymion MailMan) which also drives the load up even
> higher when it copies the mailfile to the lockfile.
>
> Any ideas? I don't think that someone checking a large mailfile
> should bring my system to a screeching halt - when a certain user
> (with an 89.4meg mailfile) checks her mail I get a page that POP3,
> SMTP, FTP and DNS are down, as soon as she is done I get a page that
> everything is up again. During the downtime I can't connect via ssh,
> if I am already in and watching a 'top' I see her popper as the
> highest process and the load is up around 40 or so.
>
> Thanks!
>
> - - -Joseph Peterson
> Network Operations
> Quantum Connections, LLC
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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