On 6/29/2011 4:12 PM, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote: > On 6/30/11, Robert Heller<heller at deepsoft.com> wrote: >> If the problem is excessive load because Sendmail / Mimedefang / spamd / >> etc. is too busy handling tons of mail/spam being dumped on your server, you >> might want to look at these sendmail options: > > Mail was my first suspect because I had similar issues with exim/spamd > locking up bad on another server. But usually that includes a high cpu > % as well. Although this suspicion did help me pinpoint one of the > causes, a script that periodically went through the email > accounts/Maildirs and that was fixed from learning about ionice on the > list. > > For a while I thought problem solved, but these couple of days, it's > acting up again and nothing's jumping out screaming "I'm the problem!" > and not being able to SSH to see what's exactly going on is making it > difficult. What's the physical disk system? I remember seeing something like that long ago where a raid controller had a large write cache that normally made it seem fast, but once in a while either filling it to a high-water mark or something else would trigger it to complete catch up before responding again - which could take several minutes with everything blocked. And nothing else ever looked out of the ordinary. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com