The machine which does nothing

[Bill Moran]

In response to Nicolas Haller <nicolas at boiteameuh.org>:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have a very strange problem with a machine. The box have a postfix
> which give e-mail to an amavisd-new and deliver ham to mailboxes.
> 
> The problem is the mail queue grow but the machine doesn't work at full
> capacity. CPU is 90% idle, vmstat don't see proc are waiting for
> anything, disks are playing poker and there is a lot of RAM available.
> 
> The machine have this problem under freebsd 6.3 and 7.0-RELEASE with a
> bi-Xeon Quad core.

amavisd and postfix do a lot of stuff.  Could be timing out on DNS or
other networking issues.  Grab a tcpdump while it's running and see
if any networking is taking an extraordinary amount of time.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com