SMTP seems very slow

lnguyen

Verified User
Joined
Apr 8, 2004
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85
SMTP seems very slow *no problem*

*edit*

I jumped too early on this... my oh so reliable email provider seemed to have some slow downs at the exact time frame I was creating accounts :(




What can I check in regards to this? It had been working fine, but suddenly, email being sent from the server (either by user or DA welcome emails) would never reach their destination.

Probably 10-20 minutes in I finally restarted the machine. Now it seems to have finally work properly.... there was a bit of a slow down, but now it seems to work right.

Anything I could check?

Linh
 
Last edited:
Linh,

There's a lot of "junk" email these days, and yes, if it attacks the network you're on, or your server, it can slow you down.

If you're running both SpamBlocker and SpamAssassin, and if all of your clients are running SpamBlocker (I know it's hard to get them to do so, but it's worth the effort) then you're probably doing all you can do.

Do you know how much incoming and outgoing bandwidth your server provider has for your server?

You can check the load on your system ("top" logged in via ssh) to see if you're server is the problem. If it is, then the best bet is to enforce SpamBlocker.

Also, we do NOT recomment current Anti-Virus solutions, because they, too, create major server loads.

You might want to check the outgoing exim queues (or have us do it for you) to see if there's a lot of outgoing email stuck in the queues that's being returned to nonexistent spammers. If there is, you can delete it, or we can, for you.

Generally the least expensive way of deleting queued email (either in time or money) is to delete all outgoing email. That's often an acceptable solution, because if mail is on the queue longer than a few minutes it's probably undeliverable anyway.

However, clearing queued email does break the Internet policy of "either deliver or return" so that step should only be taken if truly necessary.

Jeff
 
thanks for the tips. I'll keep that in mind in the future. This time it was my end that was the problem.

Linh
 
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