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 Hi,

Has anyone else had issues with smartermail 4.3 and mailservice.exe and clamd.exe using up most of the CPU?  I have 3 servers running windows 2003, plesk 8.0+ and smartermail Professional 4.3.  Each server is using using clamd.  When clamd is enabled, mailservice.exe and clamd.exe use about 80-90% CPU together all the time.  This makes everything on the server slow.  If i turn off clamd within smartermail, nothing changes.  If i kill the process and change the name of clamd.exe, clamd stops running and mailservice.exe goes down to about 5-10% CPU usage.  These servers have 1200-3200 email accounts, each of which are fairly active.  

I saw in previous posts where people had smartermail 4.0 and supposedly upgrading to 4.1 resolved this issue, but i could not find anyone having this issue on 4.3.  I also read another post that suggested using another anti-virus software in realtime scan mode to scan the spool directory.  I may try that in a day or so depending if anyone here has any other suggestions.  

I have about 8 other servers that are running smartermail 3.x Professional that do not have this issue.  So its definitely something with clamav/smartermail 4 that is causing the error. 

 Any help is appreciated.

I am also having a similar issue. I have a w2k3 server running smarter mail v4.3 which was upgraded from v3. There are 98 domains and about 340 users. The CPU on this server constantly pegged at 100% usage with all of the load coming from MailService.exe and clamd.exe. If I disable ClamAV then MailService.exe uses about 60% to 80% of the cpu consistently. The process also uses around 250MB of ram which I don't think is normal.

I also have another server without this issue, it's running SM v4.3 which was not upgraded. MailService.exe and clamd.exe on this server idles at 0% but there are only 35 domains and 100 users on that server.

 I'd really like to resolve this as it's affecting other processes running on this server. System bacups used to take 2 hours and now are taking 9 hours to run every day.

That sort of CPU is definitely not normal. I recommend opening a support ticket with us so our support agents can have a look around at your setup. As always, support tickets are refunded if it is a bug with SmarterMail. 

 I have submitted a ticket with smartertools and have been talking with them over the past week.  Our server is a dual xeon, single hard drive configuration.  We have about 300 domains on each of our smartermail 4 servers, each of which do about 80,000 messages a day.  Smartermail claims that we are doing too much mail for our server configuration.  I have just implemented just about all of smartermail's spam blocking techniques with the exception of greylisting.  I feel that this in itself may lead to more problems with delayed messages and such than a slow server does.  Anyways, what i find interesting is that we have about 8 other servers that are all running Smartermail 3 and do the same amount of messages that this server does.  Web site traffic is also just about the same.  The smartermail 3 servers run much much better.  Server CPU usage usually around 2-10%.  On the smartermail 4 server, it is constantly 100%.  I have brough this up with smartermail through the ticket i submitted and they told me that since smartermail 4 is using .net 2.0 and has added features, it cant handle as much mail.  Their exact words were:

 "One thing you need to realize is that SmarterMail 3 didn't have as many features, nor capabilities as SmarterMail 4. SmarterMail 4 was also developed with .NET 2.0, compared to SmarterMail 3 which was in .NET 1.1. These are two majorly different architectures."

So if I understand this correctly, because of the added features and use of .net 2.0, it cant handle the mail that smartermail 3 was using?   

Right now im leaning more towards downgrading to smartermail 3 than i am to using greylisting.  I just dont feel comfortable with smartermail 4.  The new features are nice, but if it cant process the mail that my users are generating, then there is no sense in even having these added features.  Is it possible to downgrade smartermail 4 to smartermail 3?  If so, are there any problems that could possibly come from this?  This was not an upgrade to SM 4, it was a full install of SM 4.  

As always, thanks for the assistance. 

I too opened a support ticket for my high CPU usage. After weeks of troubleshooting by email as well as giving the rep RDP access to my server, they came to the conclusion that my server cannot handle the load because of poor disk performance. I have a P4 3.2Ghz, 4GB RAM, 80GB HD, 99 domains, 322 users and about 65,000 messages per day delivered. I've tried disabling all external functions including all spam and AV features with no success. The only way I have found to get the CPU down is to stop the MailService, empty the Spool folder, then restart the service. The CPU usage stays low for a few hours, then the spool starts getting backed up and the cpu spike returns.

I've pretty much given up on fixing this server and I've started moving domains to another machine. I'm praying that I'll be able to get the load down to a point where the CPU doesn't spike without having to migrate all 99 domains.

If anyone has any advice, I'm all ears. Otherwise, I'll continue on with my migrations.

yea, I don't like how slow SM4 runs either. It's unacceptable really, especially with SA on a windows server. My install can't even handle 5k emails per day without the spool getting way backed up and requiring my constant attention.

I would rather have LESS features than a slow buggy system that's for sure.

We don't use SA or Clam. They are single threaded applications on a Windows server. Smartermail is multithreaded, and so is Declude which is what we use. The included AVG antivirus performs much faster than Clam. In my experience, you really can't run the loads you're talking about on a single hard drive with anti-virus and anti-spam. I've run the kind of loads you're talking about with SM4, Declude, and AVG with a dual 2.8 GHz 533MHz FSB HT Xeon, 2 GB RAM, and 2 drive Seagate ES SATA RAID 1 for the OS, 2 drive WD Raptor RAID 1 for the spool, and a 4 drive Seagate ES SATA RAID 10 for the data for since SM4 came out with good performance at my last job. That's as long as we didn't use SA or Clam. Couldn't get mail delivered with either of them going. The spool just kept getting bigger and bigger. The SM4 server I just built for the company I'm with now is an HP DL380 dual quad-core, 4 GB RAM, and 8 147 10k SAS drives in 2 RAID 1's and a RAID 10 like the last server. It's ready for SM5 when it comes out.

Right now my spool is totally empty, 1 or 2 messages coming in every couple minutes, and clamd is pegged at 99% constant.

I have many servers running Q6600 processor with WD 500gb SATA hard drives (raid1) and they can easily handle 100,000 messages delivered daily with local ClamD and average 6% cpu load.  I do offload SpamAssassin to virtual linux machines.  The problem is your 80gb hard drive, its to slow/old, upgrade it to a new 400-500gb drive and you'll be back in business.  Use Acronis Trueimage to just duplicate the drive. 

eping, are you using windows 2008 by any chance?

http://www.smartertools.com/forums/t/17519.aspx

still waiting for ANY type of comment from Smartertools on when an OFFICIAL release will be made regarding the issue.