Adam, your awsome. Just happened to be walking by the server this evening, and the drives where cranking away. I real quick used lsof and noticed a ton of enties pointing to the /var/spool/clientmqueue folder. I went an checked the folder, and there where 389,120 messages in it. They where 2 messages coming from a cron job that was running every 10 minutes, then another one every 4 hours saying that it could not get the original messages delivered and continuted to do so for 5 days until it gave up trying to deliver the message to root. Deleted all of the messages, thrashing stopped. Next question... how do I make sure that my cron job doesn't try to send a message to root when it runs? Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction. Jim > smmsp is the sendmail submission queue runner. It's a seperate sendmail > process that runs /var/spool/clientmqueue, which I believe is where > Sendmail drops outbound messages before delivery (for security through > privelege seperation). You might have a bunch of messages in the queue > that it's trying to process. > > If that queue is empty, use lsof or fstat to see what files the smmsp > user has open when the problem starts. > > On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Jim Streit wrote: > >> I have recently noticed a weird thing happening on a server that I >> have. A few times a day, the drives on my server start thrashing, >> like they are doing a massive read or write. If I look at TOP while >> this is happening the only thing that really shows active CPU cycles >> is sendmail. It uses about 8% of the processing power of the box. >> After about 10 minutes, the thrashing stops and that sendmail thread >> stops (user smmsp). During the thrashing there isn't any noticeable >> performance slowdown. >> >> The Box... >> IBM Netserver 5000 >> 2 GB RAM >> Dual PIII 550 >> 3x18 gb hot-swap scsi drives (RAID 5) >> Redhat 9.0 (with all of the latest RedHat up2date updates) >> Sendmail 8.12.8-6.90 >> >> Anyone have any ideas on what my be causing this? >> >> -- >> Jim Streit >> Partner & Co-Founder >> NorthLANs Alliance, LLC >> JimStreit at northlans.com >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> > > Adam Maloney > Systems Administrator > Sihope Communications > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list