qmail is very slow

[PTS]

Since upgrading to Plesk 10 a few months ago, qmail only sends a message or two a minute when a large amount of emails enter the queue in a short period of time. This happens when we send out email blasts on behalf of our clients.

The only way to get them out is to write a cron task to restart qmail every minute. Not very efficient.

Now the issue is coming up when there are as little as a dozen or so emails in the queue.

Any suggestions on how to figure out what is plaguing qmail on my server? I've searched the forums and none of the recommendations in other threads work for me.

Thanks in advanced.

 

[burnley]

PTS, you could be a victim of the infamous "silly qmail syndrome" describe here: http://qmail.jms1.net/silly-qmail.shtml
Since Plesk is provinding a heavily patched version of qmail, Parallels people should be able to advise whether the EXTTODO patch is part of the build you're currently running.
I don't know whether this could be a solution for you, but I've recently switch from qmail to Postfix on two production Plesk servers and had no problem at all during or after the upgrade.

 

[PTS]

Thanks burnley. Sounds like it might be the silly qmail syndrome I'm dealing with.

Is there an easy way to know if my build has or needs this patch. Also, I couldn't find any sites that detail how to install the patch. I'm not an expert server admin but can follow directions well.

 

[burnley]

PTS, you can easily check whether your build has this patch or not searching for a file named qmail-todo and a process with the same name. E.g. "rpm -ql psa-qmail| grep qmail-todo". The only Plesk-packaged qmail server we're still running doesn't have this patch, it's version psa-qmail-1.03-cos4.build92091015.22 (Plesk 9.2). All our other Plesk servers - 10.3.1 - are running Postfix as MTA, whose integration by Plesk is mature enough to justify the switch.