Topic: Is my server running out steam?

[gbentley]

Hi All,

Quick one for comment: I have an older dell server with about 45GB of email on IMAP with 35 staff with Outlook and phones. They are always sending quite large [15-20MB] drawings back / forth.

From time to time [once or twice a week] email stops working. I just reboot and all is good. I have never spent time tracking this down but did notice the other day that one of the bounce message during this period of 'error' contained a message to the effect of 'Cannot scan for Virus'

I have this feeling Clam is running out or RAM or something akin to that?

I did sometime ago increase the limit on attachments to 25MB.

Anyway this occurance seems to be on the increase. I have had a quick look in Clamd logs but only after a reboot and cant see any evidence etc

What would be the best way to try and track down the issue once it occurs?

[ReetP]

What is the spec of the server? How much RAM? Have you checked your logs or run any monitoring on server load etc?

https://wiki.contribs.org/Sysmon

Sending large attachments is always a pain - email was never really designed for it.

You are better off re-educating them and using something like the DL Ticket service https://wiki.contribs.org/DownloadTicketService, or some other file sharing type of service (eg wetransfer, though I don't really like cloudy file services personally) or maybe say Pydio https://wiki.contribs.org/Pydio

[janet]

gbentley

For starters check all those size limits. I would double them from ehat you have now.

https://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Documentation:FAQ:Section04#Set_max_email_size

Before reboot running
htop
and or
top -i
may give you clues.

Also before rebooting look at the various log files ie in server manager View log files

[Jean-Philippe Pialasse]

And the issue could also be related to huge IMAP folders slowling the connection and the server. I would start archiving data. Depeinding on your need you could archive older than 5years or 1 year.
I have seen tremendous improvement by doing so.

However you need to investigate what are the most time consuming process runing and it could be a mix of all the answers in this thread

[janet]

gbentley

Further to JPP......
A good policy with IMAP is to keep the Inbox empty, ie regularly (daily) move messages to other folders for storage if you receive big file attachments all the time.

[MSmith]

You didn't lay out the specs of your "older Dell server" (WHY NOT?) but if it's got any sort of Xeon processor it should be able to handle the email load ... once you max out the RAM AND put in solid state drive(s).