Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Mail maintenance
As some of you may be aware we are currently dealing with a recurrent issue and working towards a long term fix.
While we appreciate that no one particularly likes being held up by road works, we are also aware that no one likes bad roads either - as a comparison.
Due to a combination of utilisation abuse and general increase in mail flow our projected capacity has been exceeded. This has resulted in the delivery outage of Sunday and Yesterday (Tuesday 10pm).
To repair strangeness on mail collection and webmail issues a cache repair is required on the IMAP and POP servers, this will induce a load, causing long mail collections to time out and performance to dip.
Once these have been replicated, steps will be taken for the long term fix of moving the mail from the existing platform to the disk pack which is already in place. The newer array delivering better redundancy and throughput in general.
While every effort will be made to ensure this doesn't impinge upon your mail service, interruption's will be necessary to make these improvements, and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.
[Update Friday 2nd March 4pm]
Steps have been taken to allow the move to take place, however the current demands on the mail and mail systems are resulting in a deadlock on the move.
In quantitative terms user email is burning through around 80mb in 15 minutes at this quiet time on a Friday afternoon.
We will be taking all precautions we can to ensure that the mail stays operative, but will be unable to complete a synchronisation until levels settle down.
While we appreciate that no one particularly likes being held up by road works, we are also aware that no one likes bad roads either - as a comparison.
Due to a combination of utilisation abuse and general increase in mail flow our projected capacity has been exceeded. This has resulted in the delivery outage of Sunday and Yesterday (Tuesday 10pm).
To repair strangeness on mail collection and webmail issues a cache repair is required on the IMAP and POP servers, this will induce a load, causing long mail collections to time out and performance to dip.
Once these have been replicated, steps will be taken for the long term fix of moving the mail from the existing platform to the disk pack which is already in place. The newer array delivering better redundancy and throughput in general.
While every effort will be made to ensure this doesn't impinge upon your mail service, interruption's will be necessary to make these improvements, and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.
[Update Friday 2nd March 4pm]
Steps have been taken to allow the move to take place, however the current demands on the mail and mail systems are resulting in a deadlock on the move.
In quantitative terms user email is burning through around 80mb in 15 minutes at this quiet time on a Friday afternoon.
We will be taking all precautions we can to ensure that the mail stays operative, but will be unable to complete a synchronisation until levels settle down.
# posted by Netserve @ 11:48 AM 
