Sendmail/ftp help! ack please?

[gerald]

hehe

I seem to be having a major issue with one of my servers.
First let me say that it was not my choice nor would it ever be my choice to purchase a Raq2 web server with 16 megs of ram. heh. was just kinda forced upon me after taking this position...

My problem is that sendmail keeps crashing big and so does FTP access.
I can login with telnet fairly fine and issuing the w command shows a load average around 0.18. Doesnt seem to be eating much CPU.

If I do a 'ps aux' it shows me that Sendmail is rejecting connections on port 25 with the reason being that 12 child processes are already running. Now when I look at the sendmail processes that are running, there are like 4 that show as being active and then 8 that just say (sendmail) in the ps listing.

Can anybody tell me what it means when a process is listed in parentheses in the ps listing?

Also, when i look in /var/spool/mqueue i see the mail files that sendmail creates. For ever message there is a df---- a qf----- and a zf----- where ----- is the message identifier.
I noticed that all of the ones that start with qf---- are 0 bytes in length. I dont know if that might have something to do with my problem or not.

The other issue is that ftp connect speed are unbearably slow. Even when FTPing from another server that is on the same 100mbps network, i get transfer speeds of less than .2kb/s

Everything was working fine (or as fine as it can be on a 16meg web server...heh) a few days ago.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Even if you can just tell me what the parentheses mean in the ps command it would be great.

Thanks,
Gerald
[sig][/sig]

 

[Tardigrade]

Hi,

Usually processes that are in parentheses have been swapped out to disk. I can't really help with the rest though :-( perhaps you could increase the size of the swap and see if that helps?

Good luck
--
Scott [sig][/sig]

 

[gerald]

Thanks Scott. Atleast that is 1 mystery solved. heh

I think Ive come to the conclusion that the best way to fix this server is to remove the cover, place a couple ounces of C4 inside with a detonator connected to the power button.

heh... apparently the person that is using this server is trying to establish an email presence for about 450 users... ( as well as 35+ virtual web hosts ) on 16 megs(EDO) and a 4GB hard drive (standard IDE not UDMA-Anything). i refuse to deal with it anymore.


Thanks,
Gerald