[Techtalk] Unusually high loads w/sendmail

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 09:44:39PM -0500 or thereabouts, Scott wrote:
> Hi Gang-
> 
> I had a BSDi server, originally a Pentium 100 with 64 megs of ram serving 
> 2,300 email accounts via sendmail and qpopper.  This machine also handled 
> user home pages and radius.  It crashed a little over a week ago......I 
> was hoping to go Debian, but in the interest of getting up as soon as 
> possible I grabbed Red Hat 7.2 and installed, up in 29 minutes.
> 
> Machine config:  Dual PIII, 600 MHz, gig of ram, raid 5.  Install Red Hat 
> 7.2 with sendmail, qpopper, OpenWebMail, apache and Spam Assassin's spamd 
> daemon.  My load averages are hitting 6 on average, dropping to 2 or 3 
> late at night.  The machine is overloaded, customers call and their 
> Outlooks time out, some even give the error that xinetd is refusing the 
> connection.
> 
> Needless to say I am very disappointed that a RH machine with this horse 
> power can not even handle what BSDi did on a Pentium 100.  I did disable 
> spamd and makes no difference.
> 
> My question:  would Debian serve me better or any other thoughts?  

I don't know about Debian. I also don't know how CPU-intensive some
of the apps you list are. I have heard that SpamAssassin can munch 
a lot. I know that both sendmail and Apache can be tweaked for 
performance, but I have never had to do either.

I think a few lines of top or a summary of what precisely is eating
how much CPU or memory might help narrow down which of that lot are
the culprits. 

Also, is there anything else running on the box which doesn't need
to be running?

Telsa