From owner-freebsd-questions Thu May 20 22:13:34 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 306C914C4A for ; Thu, 20 May 1999 22:13:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id AAA27256; Fri, 21 May 1999 00:13:29 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan) Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 00:13:29 -0500 From: Dan Nelson To: cjclark@home.com Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: Columns in Script Outpur Message-ID: <19990521001329.A27049@dan.emsphone.com> References: <19990520233914.A26666@dan.emsphone.com> <199905210450.AAA20795@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.5i In-Reply-To: <199905210450.AAA20795@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>; from "Crist J. Clark" on Fri May 21 00:50:32 GMT 1999 X-OS: FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In the last episode (May 21), Crist J. Clark said: > Dan Nelson wrote, > > In the last episode (May 21), Crist J. Clark said: > > > Perhaps a better workaround is to not require this at all. I have a > > > FreeBSD mailserver at work, and one particular user is complaining > > > about the machine's performance. I've noticed lags and stalls here > > > and there which I have always accounted to disk access times. I want > > > to verify this is the problem and consider solutions. I am trying to > > > collect performace and operational data about the box to figure this > > > out. > > > > Is this an email router (i.e. bunch of sendmail processes), or a > > pop/imap host? If it's a pop/imap host and you're using UW-imapd, try > > switching to cyrus imapd, which doesn't bog down when users have large > > mailboxes. If it's a sendmail box, see how big your mail backlog is at > > any one time (mailq ; entries with a * are active) and possibly > > throttle back the number of active sendmail processes allowed at any > > one time. > > It's both a POP/IMAP/NFS server and SMTP-outgoing machine. From my > experience, the IMAP serving is the limiting factor. Once someone lets > their mailspool get up > 2-3MB, performace can be seriously impacted. > I've been considering the move to Cyrus. That UW-IMAP is not optimized > for disk I/O. 2-3MB should be no problem. uw-imap should start getting slow around maybe 15-20MB. > I think I'll do it now. I was not sure if another server would > help. The machine is a lil' 585 with 24 MB RAM and two IDE drives. I > was trying to find out if it was _just_ the specific implamentation of > IMAP that was trouble or IMAP just happened to be something that > precipitated swaps. Hold it right there. Move those disks to SCSI right now, before you do _anything_ else. I'm not saying it's the cause of all your problems, but IDE disks just are not meant to be put in servers. -Dan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message