Mail server intermittent freeze

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sat, Jan 20, 2007 at 07:56:08PM -0600, Rich Winkel wrote:
> I'm pulling out what's left of my hair trying to figure out this one.
> It's not a pretty sight.  Save the people who have to look at me!
> 
> It's a 1ghz intel P3 with 512MB ram, running 4.11-p26 with sendmail,
> imapd-uw, qpopper, stunnel-4.14_2 and p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.1.1, as
> well as tty logins.
> It's an nis and nfs client (nfs=home dirs).  It has an fxp network card
> which is in polling mode (although the problem started before it was put
> in polling mode)
> 
> The system will freeze maybe every 5 minutes, sometimes for up to
> a minute.  Almost completely: low level terminal io on the console
> still works.  I can switch tty's (ALT-Fn) and carriage returns
> are echoed (and discarded) while showing "netstat -w 1" output.
> But interactive prompts are frozen.  No user-level processing is
> apparent.  Network traffic is heavy, we're getting massive amounts
> of spam, and spamd's load on the system has jumped considerably
> in the past few weeks.  Average system load used to hover around .8,
> now it averages over 2, mostly due to spamd.

Usually this is because a transient load is causing it to swap.  512MB
isn't really a lot of RAM on a heavily loaded server.

Kris
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