Sun Oct 24 15:36:07 PDT 1999 — Slow Usenet and mail server performance. Ultra has been having trouble accepting new posts intermittantly since Thursday. I’ve just restarted innd, and it’s performing well now. We’ve got a new news server on it’s way, so we’ll limp along for another week or few on Ultra as we deploy the new box. The new server, our fourth news server incarnation since Sonic.net’s inception has half a gigabyte of RAM and over 100 gigs of Usenet news spool space. It’s a huge, fire breathing, satellite linked super-fast powerhouse. Notably, it’s also our first non-Linux server, and our first non-INN based Usenet news server. The new system runs the Typhoon Usenet server under Solaris 7. Over 50,000 newsgroups will be available, and binaries will be quite complete. The new satellite downlink allows for two full T1s (3Mbps) worth of inbound bandwidth while freeing space on our terrestrial circuits for customer traffic. We are also expecting an upgrade from 3Mbps to 10Mbps in the next few months to handle expanding Usenet volume.
As a result of Ultra’s trouble receiving new posts, Buzz, our inbound mail server has had a backlog of inbound mail delivery. qmail on Buzz will deliver 10 local messages concurrently, and what was happening was that the news posting backlogs for spam@sonic.net were using up all 10 queue slots for many minutes as a time. We’ve deferred the spam mail to a local mailbox on Buzz for a time, and the queue backlog is clearing. Sorry for the inbound email delay this afternoon! -Dane