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POP3 Users timing out

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redsevens

IS-IT--Management
Aug 11, 2000
40
US
Hello,
I'm running sendmail on a Linux server at my company. Everything is set up so that it works correctly, but now that we are getting more and more e-mail accounts users are timing out when they attempt to connect. I am assuming that the server is just overloaded (25,000 hits/day, most of which are between 8 AM and 5 PM), but shouldn't people still be able to connect? I tailed the maillog and it's not a constant pouring in of data, there is usually some activity for a second and then no activity for a few seconds. At its busiest, there seems to be no more than 15 seconds of constant activity, and the resource meters aren't jumping off the charts. The other possibility I've considered is that the bottleneck is the network connection.

What can I do to improve this? For starters, I'm going to decrease user's settings so they aren't all checking their mail every minute or two, so eight minutes should cut the traffic by 75%-87% (not counting for when mail is present...). Is there any tweaking that can be done with sendmail or the Linux box, or the network for that matter? Changing all user settings is timely and seems like it may only mask the problem, if it's due to bad settings in sendmail itself.
 
One thing I found with qpopper which I use for pop3 mail on the server is that if I activated it with the -R switch to stop it doing reverse lookups on the client, it worked a lot faster and none of the 85 clients got a timeout. I had this working on the old RedHat box (P133 with 64M & 10M/bit network) on a 100Mbit network without any problems.

Now the machine is a dual PIII and has a couple of 100MBit nics and doesn't have any issues at all, with or without the -R...

AV
tnedor@yahoo.com
 
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