[vchkpw] vdelivermail slow delivery (too much...)
I'm experiencing problem setting up a mail server with qmail+vpopmail+mysql. The hardware is a Compaq Prolian 7000 whith 1.5 gb RAM and RAID 5 storage (100 gb). There are 2 partition (both ext3) / and /var. qmail and vpopmail are installed in /var. The mail server has about 200 hosted domain but only one is big. This one has about 20k mail accounts. The problem is that when qmail delivers mail (via qmail-local-vdelivermail) to small domain, the time elapsed is small. When it delivers mail to the (only) big domain the operation is really long. Is seems that vdelivermail spends a lot of time delivering the mail. Just for example: a mail to a little domain takes 1 sec (at most) to be delivered, a mail to huge domain takes more than 60 sec. These test have been done using 3 conncurrent local delivery agent. I tried to move (only for testing) the vpopmail's directory of big domain to a tmpfs partition and times reduced to about 10 secs. The problem shouldn't be of mysql. Any idea? May be the storage too slow? Do famd and courier-imap impact on system' performance? Thanks Luca ICT Made Easy N.C.E. Network Consulting Engineering srl http://www.nce-ict.it
Re: [vchkpw] vdelivermail slow delivery (too much...)
The hardware is a Compaq Prolian 7000 whith 1.5 gb RAM and RAID 5 storage (100 gb). There are 2 partition (both ext3) / and /var. qmail and vpopmail are installed in /var. The mail server has about 200 hosted domain but only one is big. This one has about 20k mail accounts. Aha! Problem probably found! I have had similar problems with large mail accounts on ext3 partitions. Above some number of files (which I've never bothered to find out), server load goes through the roof and delivery slows to a crawl. I suspect you have one or more users with thousands of files in their maildir -- possibly a postmaster account set to catch-all (which is dangerous), that is never checked and is full of spam. Move your maildirs onto a parition formatted with a filesystem better suited to large numbers of files in directories. Reiserfs is liked by many and is frequently recommended by others on this list. I use XFS myself, mainly due to its very nice backup/dump tools. -Bill * Waveform Technology UNIX Systems Administrator