On 6/30/11, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > Again, fixable by not sharing the disk the guest uses with the disk the host > needs to load programs from... The disk head is always going to be in the > wrong place. Well, let's just say my original recommendation specifications for this particular set was a HP ML110G6 with 8GB, 2x 250GB for the host and 2x1.5TB storage drives, told them the extra memory and drives could be bought OTS so they don't have to pay HP prices for that. What I end up working with is a no-brand desktop quad core with a pair of 500GB... so the chances of convincing them to fork out extra for hardware isn't good. Unfortunately I'm stuck with making things work because managing the server was part of the contract sold with the apps. > But, odds are that the source of the problem is starting too many mail > delivery programs, especially if they, or the user's local procmail, starts a > spamassassin instance per message. Look at the mail logs for a problem time > to see if you had a flurry of messages coming in. Sendmail/MimeDefang is > fairly good at queuing the input and controlling the processes running at once but > even with that you may have to throttle the concurrent sendmail processes. Does it make a difference if I'm running Exim instead of sendmail/MimeDefang? Right now it doesn't look like an mail run, more like a httpd run because it's starting to look like a large number of httpd threads was spawned just before that. Unfortunately, I also discovered that logrotate was wrongly configured and I only have daily logs. Fixed that, hopefully, and shall see if I get something better to work on if it strikes again.