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SmarterMail high memory usage (1.3gb)
Question asked by Douglas Setzer - 2/7/2014 at 10:27 AM
Answered
I have been running a SmarterMail server pretty unsuccessfully for quite a while. I am on a VPS server at Newtek (aka Crystal Tech in the old days). I had an archaic machine and installation of SmarterMail but finally upgraded to a more current machine:
 
- SmarterMail Pro - v11.4.4926
- Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter
- 3gb RAM
 
I also run IIS on this machine + serve a small number of sites (~15-20).
 
I think I disabled ClamAV at one point, but I'm honestly not sure nor do I recall how to check that.
 
My questions are:
1) How do find out why it's taking up so much ram?
2) The service stops itself periodically + randomly, but I can't find anything in the Windows Event Log. Where do I look for clues as to "why"? I assume it has to do with the memory utilization.
3) My mails are generally slow to be delivered coming and/or going out. Where do I look for "whys" for this?

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Grady Werner Replied
Employee Post
We made a lot of performance/memory fixes in mail patches, so the first order of business should be upgrading to the latest mail 11 build.  Mail 12 (in beta) will be released soon, as well, and it uses significantly fewer resources in many use cases.  If you have upgrade protection current, keep an eye out for that.
 
What part of SmarterMail is chewing up memory, IIS or MailService.exe?  That's step one for figuring things out.  The other issues are likely resolved by moving up to 11.7.  The version you're on is from 8 months ago, and a lot of things have been resolved since then.  See http://www.smartertools.com/smartermail/releasenotes/v11.aspx for release notes.
 
 
Grady Werner SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Douglas Setzer Replied
It's MailService.exe that's grown quite large.
 
I'll look at upgrading the minor version this weekend and see if it helps things.
 
Be happy that it's just 8 months old- I upgraded after 8 years last time!
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Douglas Setzer Replied
More information, it's a server that hosts 8 domains and 40 mailboxes. There are 3 mailing lists that support 100-500 users with sporadic mailings from the list owner (1 a week or thereabouts).
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Bruce Earnest Replied
I'm having issues with MailService.exe, latest build of version 11.7, crashing approximately every 18 hours on Windows Server 2012 R2.  It begins using very little memory and over the course of a day it gradually increments until all available memory is consumed and the service becomes so slow that no mail is processed.  Restarting the service resolves the problem... for about 17-18 hours.  Seems like everytime I upgrade to a new release there are problems, yet SmarterTools claim to pride themselves on releasing products that work out of the box.
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Douglas Setzer Replied
Marked As Answer
Bruce, you should likely start your own thread with your issues so that it gets better visibility.
 
As for my answer- thanks to my duplicate post in the Community Forums, I both upgraded and tracked down a hacked account that was sending out a significant amount of spam per day.
 
I checked my System Trends --> Traffic Reports and am seeing astounding usage for such a limited # of domains and email accounts. Looks like in the last week, my lowest mail volume was 108,000 messages and highest was 495,000 messages.

I then dug into the System Summary Reports --> Traffic Reports and was able to see that the obscene mail volume came from one domain (1,321,582 messages). Drilling into that, I found the one account that appears to have been compromised sending all but 34 of those messages.

I went into the domain manager, picked that domain to manage and checked the user account. Sure enough, the password was simple accountname123. I changed its password and marked it as disabled with no access to mail services.
...
At the end of this, my spool still had a good 100,000 messages. I wrote a script in VBScript that looked for a handful of common strings that were found in the spam messages (either the compromised account, or various sender/recipients) and was able to clear it out with a few passes of the script. My spool is empty, my CPU utilization isn't crazy high (on a dual CPU machine) and my memory utilization for MailService.exe is hovering right around 160mb.
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Bruce Earnest Replied
Installed build 11.7b5156, memory usage improved, but still crashing. Installed SmarterMail 12, and brought server online on Saturday around 10:30 p.m., MailService.exe still consuming a minimum of 70% of available memory. Uptime 1 day, 20 hours, 29 minutes, MailService.exe now consuming 82% of available memory, no messages in the spool. Hasn't crashed yet, but at the rate of incrementation it's only a matter of time.

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