Forums & Blog

I upgraded from 5.1.3 to 5.5.3159 on Friday night.

Everything seemed to work fine with the lower weekend email volumes. But on Monday, we started getting complaints of slow email. Monday night at 10PM, there were 10,000 emails in the spool. Worked on it til 12AM, checking various settings. At 12AM, the spool was down to ~6k messages and declining.

At 9AM on Tuesday, there were 8k messages in the spool. An inspection of a few of the messages showed that they were not spam, and many were for local delivery.  By 1PM, there were nearly 20K messages in the spool.

Reverting to version 5.1.3 resolved the problem. (installed 5.1.3 over 5.5, then installed 5.1.3 again as a repair install). v5.1.3 cleared the spool over the next hour.

Tried 5.5 again. The spool was up to 1k within 15 minutes. Reverted to 5.1.3 again. Then the spool droped to 146, within 15 minutes.

I ran log parser against the delivery log for 2008.09.09. Keep in mind that I disabled logging at times, to try to find if it was disk errors. I also restarted smartermail and the server several times through the day.

I tried to pick hours where the log had been on for the entire hour. The log parser queries were like:

 LOGPARSER "Select Text from E:\logs\2008.09.09-delivery.log where Text like '13:%' AND Text like '%Delivery started for%'" -i:TEXTLINE -rtp:-1 -q:Off

LOGPARSER "Select Text from E:\logs\2008.09.09-delivery.log where Text like '13:%' AND Text like '%Delivery finished for%'" -i:TEXTLINE -rtp:-1 -q:Off

The results for v5.5: During 12:00 hour, "Delivery started for" count 6903 with the last one coming at 12:29,  "Delivery finished for" count 1367 with the last at 12:59.

1:00 hour, "Delivery started for" count 17163,  "Delivery finished for" count 1360.

2:00 hour, Started: 11921. Finished: 1353

I reverted to 5.1.3 sometime after 3:00PM (maybe 3:15). The results for 5.1.3,

15:00 hour, Started: 25772. Finished: 9719

16:00 hour, Started: 6983. Finished: 10136

All times eastern standard time. 

Anybody else seeing this with 5.5? What stands out to me is hours 12, 13 , 14 all topped out right around 1360 messages delivered.

Error in spool svc? Error in throttle svc?

I ran process explorer. No file access errors. The only thing that ever showed up as not found was reg key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Cryptography\Offload. But I don't think that is the problem.

 

 

 

 

 

We had exactly the same issue.  Upgraded and the spool went nuts.

Downgraded and all is OK again.

Any official word on this?

All previos versions of smartermail worked ok on rhis hardware. But sm 5.5 did not. So I don't think that it is hardware related, but here is my hardware config.

OS Name Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Server 2003, Web Edition
Version 5.2.3790 Service Pack 2 Build 3790
System Model PowerEdge 1800
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 1 GenuineIntel ~2793 Mhz
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 1 GenuineIntel ~2793 Mhz
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 1 GenuineIntel ~2793 Mhz
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 1 GenuineIntel ~2793 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Dell Computer Corporation A07, 9/29/2006
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.2.3790.3959 (srv03_sp2_rtm.070216-1710)"
Time Zone Eastern Daylight Time
Total Physical Memory 2,047.27 MB
Available Physical Memory 1.57 GB

Network Card: Intel(R) PRO/1000 MT Network Connection
Registry: DisableTaskOffload = 1

Disks: raid 10 for user mailboxes

pparry:

We had exactly the same issue.  Upgraded and the spool went nuts.

Downgraded and all is OK again.

Any official word on this?

 

 I had same issue too. My SM4 installation normally sends about 800 emails per 5 minutes and it can sends up to 3000 emails per 5 minutes. But after upgrading to SM5.5 it could send only 300 emails. I disabled SA and AV.  So I downgraded to v4 again. Acutualy SM 5 is not usefull because it can't send mail as fast as v4. I'm waiting for a response from SM team.

 

We also had this problem, 5.5 was processing around 100 emails very 5 minutes, but most of the time it was half of that. Using a previous v5 on exactly the same server with no changes it was sending around 2000 emails every 5 minutes.

We had to downgrade also - would like an offical comment on this from SmarterTools. 

CSN-Carl:

We also had this problem, 5.5 was processing around 100 emails very 5 minutes, but most of the time it was half of that. Using a previous v5 on exactly the same server with no changes it was sending around 2000 emails every 5 minutes.

That would put the limit of smartermail version 5.5 at 1200 messages per hour, which is very close to our observed limit of 1300 messages per hour.

Our hardware config is posted above. Do you mind posting your harware config?

 I'm sure this is not hardware issue because SM4 is working fine on the same same machine

we have delivery issue as well... which eventually crashes the server. i was told it was since it was not hosted on IIS so we made teh swtich.. same issues then i was told to try modifying the asp config file... didnt work

 

we can do 10k/5min for about 4 hours then 3-5k/5min.... and then crash after an hour or so causing our email to go hours behind in the spool.

 

if you have an hp server make sure to get the latest hp service pack. also if you have a broadcom nic try disabling tcp offloading.

 

try changing the default smtp threads from 30 to 100 ... if not even more. try using 50 spool folders. 

If it runs for 4 hours then maybe you can set up a scheduled task to stop and restart the mailservice every 4 hours as a temporary solution.

-Joe

Sure...

2x 250Gb HD's (SATAII)
4Gb RAM
Quad Core Xeon 2.66Ghz Processor (6Mb Cache)

Please can we have a response from SmarterTools on this? I don't really want to have to send a support ticket as it will cost me money, and I'm not prepared to spend money when it is quite clearly a bug. 

check your event logs... are you guys getting asp crashes followed by hard drive related issues when this occurs?

 

ours crashes not every 4 hours so its not that simple of a sscript. plus we can't reboot every 4 hours unless we want our marketing emails to fall 1-2 hours behind due to queueing. for us we have these odd asp errors ever since we upgraded... they told us it was the default web client so we switch to iis same stuff...

 

we have 2x-xeons... 6gb ram... 5 15k scsi hard drives... we sometimes get 14-20k messages in a 5 minute period. in the last few weeks we get 10k-15k... followed by errors then 3-6k... then followed by a crash this happens once every 2 days. 

No hard drive errors here. No smartermail crashes either.

All versions prior to 5.5 work properly. Version 5.5 is very slow handling email in the spool.

We have one error that pops up here and there in the event log. It happens with both 5.5.x or 5.1.x, but it is web mail, not the spool.

Event code: 3005
Event message: An unhandled exception has occurred.
Event time: 8/14/2008 11:44:58 PM
Event time (UTC): 8/15/2008 3:44:58 AM
Event ID: c0e09b718d324c1b9433903d8968f9bf
Event sequence: 13
Event occurrence: 4
Event detail code: 0
 
Application information:
    Application domain: /LM/W3SVC/892963906/Root-1-128631775856093750
    Trust level: Full
    Application Virtual Path: /
    Application Path: C:\SmarterMail\MRS\
    Machine name: MAIL6
 
Process information:
    Process ID: 2220
    Process name: w3wp.exe
    Account name: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
 
Exception information:
    Exception type: ArgumentException
    Exception message: An item with the same key has already been added.
 
Request information:
    Request URL: http://xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
    Request path: /Main/frmPreview.aspx
    User host address: 207.224.xxx.xxx
    User: 
    Is authenticated: False
    Authentication Type: 
    Thread account name: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
 
Thread information:
    Thread ID: 13
    Thread account name: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
    Is impersonating: False
    Stack trace:    at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowArgumentException(ExceptionResource resource)
   at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.Insert(TKey key, TValue value, Boolean add)
   at SMWeb05.UserControls.MessageContents.ReplaceInlineAttachments(MessagePartData part, StringBuilder sbHTML, Dictionary`2& cidParts)
   at SMWeb05.UserControls.MessageContents.ReplaceInlineAttachments(MessagePartData part, StringBuilder sbHTML, Dictionary`2& cidParts)
   at SMWeb05.UserControls.MessageContents.GetHTML()
   at SMWeb05.UserControls.MessageContents.GetMessageOutput()
   at SMWeb05.Main.frmPreview.LoadMessage()
   at SMWeb05.Main.frmPreview.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e)
   at System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e)
   at System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e)
   at System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e)
   at SMWeb05.HelperClasses.CustomPage.OnLoad(EventArgs e)
   at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive()
   at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)

 

We had a problem when moving to a new server with 4.3. It was related to certain network cards. I was able to work with SmarterTools and change an "optimization" parameter on the card's driver and the problem was solved. This may not be related but thought I should mention it.

Here is a link to the KB article: http://www.smartertools.com/portal/KB/a148/connection-timeouts-mailserviceexe-crashes-ip-binding.aspx?KBSearchID=59361

TOE is already disabled on the NIC.

I tried 5.5 again Sat Sept 20th. Same problem.. The spool started to backup. Inspecting the messages showed that they were all (at least the ones I looked at) for local delivery.

So the smtp-in service is working properly, and the messages are being written to the spool. But the spool service is not sending the messages to the user mailboxes, or at least not very quickly.

Reverting to version 5.1.3, cleared the spool in seconds.

 

We had similar issue when ST released V3. I posted the  issue here and they released an hotfix within few days. Its very bad that we have not any reply from ST staffs.

 

simpson:

Reverting to version 5.1.3, cleared the spool in seconds.

 Simpson,

I can't find v5.1.3  in ST web site. Do you have its download link.