Please help for slow server problem
 

Hi, i have a problem with Isp config.
I followed Perfect debian setup with a p4 2.8 ram 512 hd 80gb pc.
My server run very slow, this sometimes not always.
i have 2 domain and a total of 90 user.
This is the top output if it is usefull:
top - 12:19:10 up 5 days, 4:17, 1 user, load average: 97.96, 89.91, 84.14
Tasks: 303 total, 52 running, 241 sleeping, 0 stopped, 10 zombie
Cpu(s): 50.0% us, 50.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 450892k total, 446220k used, 4672k free, 1636k buffers
Swap: 1317288k total, 671632k used, 645656k free, 55652k cached

From top command, seem that i have a lot of spamassasin task running.
I don't know very well linux.
Thank you
Alex

Spamassassin is a memory killer. OTOH, it only comes to action when an email is received (as per default, things may be different when you tweaked your installation). You have 512K for 90 users, which is rather low. How much messages do you get per hour on average?

When no mail is being received, there should not be any spamassassin process. Might be worth to investigate why there are so many processes left. You also have 10 zombies ("dead" processes). Could those be those spamassassin ones?

You might try to get rid of these by stopping starting ISPConfig, but I'm afraid you'll have to reboot the server. Watch the swap space being used. As soon as that happens your system will slow down significantly.

So, if i remove the spam control, i will resolve the problem in your opinion?
Thank you

Yes, at the cost of having much more spam in the users inboxes. So this is only a temp workaround IMHO.

I tried to stop isp_config and reboot the server but after it i'm always with the problem
top - 13:42:24 up 9 min, 2 users, load average: 78.61, 64.01, 32.97
Tasks: 419 total, 1 running, 381 sleeping, 0 stopped, 37 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.6% us, 1.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 93.4% wa, 0.7% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 450892k total, 448196k used, 2696k free, 1228k buffers
Swap: 1317288k total, 688136k used, 629152k free, 12500k cached


There is a solution for reset all this task and restart

Thanks

Something is completely clogging your system. And it's very IO intensive (look at wait time, that's waiting for disks data to be returned to the requesting program). Also, you now have even 37 zombies. That's worse then before. What's the output of?

martinfst i don't know how thank you.
Well, the problem seem to be a mail sended in the morning from a user to 50 user with an attachment of 4MB.
Now the top say
top - 14:12:52 up 40 min, 3 users, load average: 27.07, 46.73, 61.66
Tasks: 85 total, 2 running, 83 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 9.6% us, 1.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 88.7% wa, 0.3% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 450892k total, 313392k used, 137500k free, 2864k buffers
Swap: 1317288k total, 265372k used, 1051916k free, 28904k cached

and go down.
Sorry for my english ;)

Thanks again for your support.

:confused:
Spamassassin should skip such large files by default, as these are normally not spam. IIRC, the default is to leave alone any email larger then 250k.

I tried to quickly find the settings for ISPConfig, but not sure where to look and I don't have time to investigate further. Till, Falko?

Well, seem that to process an email, spamassassin and clamscan use a lot of time.
I see that for every mail, there is a mail to admispconfig@localhost.localdomain, why?

And yes, clamav e spamassasin scan all mail.

Alex

That's an adminstrative email to count the used bandwith/bytes for email. These are really small emails and should not be of much problem. I'm still wondering why ISPConfig does not follow the default of SA to skip large emails.