SmarterMail 13.0.5430 gets slow over time

Problem reported by David Sovereen - 11/27/2014 at 8:17 PM

Submitted

Hello,

Since upgrading to 13.0 from 12.3, SmarterMail seems to slow down over time.

We upgraded from 12.3 to 13.0.5420 on November 16. Our CPU and Memory graphs were very consistent on 12.3 over time. The max CPU ever recorded on 12.3 was 13% and the max memory used was 3.3 GB. Since upgrading to 13.0, over only 13 days, CPU has grown to 20% yesterday and memory to 5.3 GB a couple days ago.

The real problem is the massive slowdown occurring on the web interface. You can click to see a message and wait 10 to 20 seconds for the message to come up. It got really bad tonight. The web interface became mostly non-responsive. I decided to restart the SmarterMail service. WHAM, everything is running fast again.

My gut tells me there is a bug in 13.0 that is chewing up CPU and memory resources over time and causing this. I'm just not sure what information I can provide to help SmarterTools fix it.

Thanks,

Dave

9 Replies

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Bruce Barnes Replied

11/27/2014 at 8:40 PM

We have the latest version of SmarterMail 13.X running on 5 different servers, including: 2003, 2008, and 2012 and have seen none of this.

Are you running under IIS and did you DISABLE the SmarterMail web services?

When you upgraded, did you upgrade from a prior version of 13.X, or a lower major version number?

If you did a major version upgrade, did you uninstall the OLD version, REBOOT the server, and then install the new version?

If not, then uninstall, reboot, and reinstall, and this should resolve your issue.

Bruce Barnes ChicagoNetTech Inc brucecnt@comcast.net Phonr: (773) 491-9019 Phone: (224) 444-0169 E-Mail and DNS Security Specialist Network Security Specialist Customer Service Portal: https://portal.chicagonettech.com Website: https://www.ChicagoNetTech.com Security Blog: http://networkbastion.blogspot.com/ Web and E-Mail Hosting, E-Mail Security and Consulting

David Sovereen Replied

11/28/2014 at 4:58 PM

Yes, we are running IIS. This is a Windows 2008 RS Server. The SmarterMail web service is disabled.

We upgraded from 12.3. Yes, 12.3 was uninstalled, the server was rebooted, and 13.0 was installed.

We are a long-time user of SmarterMail, and have a historical record of CPU and Memory, so while I can't be 100%, I'm 99% certain there is a bug in 13.0 causing this.

Bruce Barnes Replied

11/28/2014 at 8:03 PM

We, too, are long-term users of SmarterMail.

The only times we have ever seen this kind of behavior is:

When a file was corrupted during an installation - requiring an UNINSTALL, REBOOT, and REINSTALL, or;
When multiple drives failed in a RAID array and the CPU was "fighting for it's life" as it attempted to keep SmarterMail processing, or;
When memory was failing, and, again, the SmarterMail service was attempting to keep SmarterMail working.

So, I would first, UNINSTALL, REBOOT, and REINSTALL. As you know from previous experience, all configuration, user data and e-mail will be preserved. Don't forget to STOP and DISABLE the internal SmarterMail web server after the uninstall / reinstall process.

If that fails, I would look at the RAID CONTROLLER and HARD DRIVE situation. Check your hard drives (which may require an actual visit to the server by someone in the hosting center to physically look at the server) and see the drive status(es).

With regard to the alleged bug issue, I believe others would be complaining about the same issue, and you's is the first complaint I've seen in the forums.

You can also open a ticket with SmarterTools - which will be refunded if this is actually a bug, but my bet in on a bad file or server issues and not SmarterMail.

Michael Replied

11/29/2014 at 12:18 PM

Check your Indexing Status...

Manage | Indexing Status

Do you have a user or two that are continually re-indexing? We saw that problem in a previous build and it was later resolved for us. But the re-indexing severely drove up CPU usage and Memory.

Eric Bourland Replied

12/6/2014 at 9:14 AM

I noticed a slowdown, too, when I updated from 12.5 to 13.0.

I noticed ClamD, in particular, seemed to be using a lot of memory. Also, SmarterMail and the entire server seemed sluggish.

This morning I uninstalled 13.0, and did a fresh install of 13.1. I notice SmarterMail is faster now, and the server seems back to its responsive self.

A backup / uninstall / reinstall might be in order, as Bruce notes.

HTH,

Eric

YS Tech Replied

2/19/2015 at 4:49 AM

We also have this issue of gradually building memory usage, I have to stop and start the service every now and again to get things moving.

On V13.2.5511

On a Windows server.

Mailserver.exe gradually builds from start to 500mb in around 30 mins and keeps going from there...

Dave, did you ever cure your problems?

Thanks

Anthony

YS Tech Replied

4/30/2015 at 4:11 AM

Still having memory issues, have slowed it down by removing the ant-virus checks but thats not ideal, could do with those checks running.

There's never really any more than 50 items in the spool at any 1 time, so i can't see that its doing a lot of work.
I can't understand why its using so much memory to do not a lot (currently 12 items in the spool and running a 1gb memory usage!)

Any ideas anyone, is this still a problem for people?
Running... V13.3.5535

Paul King Replied

7/29/2015 at 5:13 AM

We are running on Windows server 2012 and the latest version and it's so slow. With regard to memory usage I am currently looking at 564.3 MB of memory without any traffic going through the box at all

There is very little in the KB about speeding up the throughput of the server and and is now poorly written with reference to old menu items so it makes it needlessly complex to follow any instruction.

Marc Levante Replied

12/14/2016 at 7:44 PM

We have also experienced memory instability issues with SmarterMail 11.x and 12.x. We have 12 GB of RAM. We have had increasingly bad experiences when upgrading SmarterMail, so we decided not to upgrade any longer until we see a stable release (from various blogs). The issue we see is that SmarterMail steadily increasing memory usage to about 700MB and suddenly goes down to about 500MB and this repeats many times over a period of half hour and then suddenly for no apparent reason the CPU goes up to 70% from about an average of 5% and the memory consumption goes flat (at around 600MB) and the server slows down. I have 2 Xenon CPUs each with 4 cores. WebMail becomes nearly impossible to use. This high CPU level remains for about 30 minutes, after which the whole process repeats itself. I have to restart the mail service to stop the cycle. Eventually, one of the times the mail service is restarted, it works perfectly - until I have to restart the server again for other reasons (such as restoring a mailbox for a customer).

Based on the historical list of documented fixes in each minor upgrade in V15, I am not confident at all V15 is stable. I will give SmarterMail a chance with V16 as I read it is a completely new rewrite. But, I still am worried about the QA process which clearly is lacking

Marc Levante
InnoTech

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