Tomcat Crashes when sending mail

[ndsharp]

Last Friday I came into to work to find zimbra crashed and people annoyed. Looking at the logs I found (in mailbox.log) that there was a problem ( java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space ) Looking through the forum I found a few references to this and tried some of the suggestions. None worked. I tried setting the tomcat_java_heap_precent or whatever to a high number and renaming the redo.log in case there was something hanging in there, but no luck.

My problem seems a little different than some others. Tomcat only crashes when sending mail. I can get to my inbox from the webmail client. But as soon as I hit send on a new message the memory usage on the zimbra server by the java service goes to about 75% (all free memory) and them bam, its crashed.

Its a decent machine with a gig of ram. Most times it has 300 - 500 MB ram free. Gets down to about 30mb when zimbra is acting up.


So, what do I need to do to fix this?
I like zimbra and it seems easy to administer and works good with samba. I would hate to go back to OpenXchange (a pain to administer) but we need email.

[jholder]

Hi ND,
There are a couple things that can cause this. For example, if you a user has 1,000 messages in a box, then just deletes them all, it might consume the rest of your RAM, and cause tomcat to crash. That's not a bug, it just requires more memory.

That, however, is less likely. In order to solve this, we'll need the /opt/zimbra/log/mailbox.log and /opt/zimbra/tomcat/logs/catalina.out

Keep in mind that cat.out gets rewritten each time you start the Zimbra server, so you'll need to preserve the "evidence"

It would also be useful if you updated your profile to reflect which version of Zimbra and OS you're running, for future reference.

Good luck,
john

[ndsharp]

I attached the logs in a zip file. I gave you the whole catalina log and the last two complaints out of mailbox.log (there were lots that all looked the same.) And I changed the email addresses to protect the innocent

Thanks for the help.


-- Nick

[ndsharp]

No ideas? Do you need any more information?
I wish I could get this fixed myself but I am sadly at a loss.



Thanks,

-- Nick

[soxfan]

Are you using a server other than the Zimbra server for sending email? (Zimbra Admin console --> Servers --> myzimbraserver.mydomain.com --> MTA tab). I was having a similar problem a few weeks ago, and found that the issue was with my separate MTA server. When that was having problems and wouldn't accept messages from the Zimbra server I got the "Java heap space" errors.

[jholder]

Also, this may be a redo log issue. Try moving it out, and start Zimbra.

[ndsharp]

Yes I am having zimbra forward email to another server for non-local mail. But that was working fine not that long ago. And it is crashing when just sending local mail not just external.

Also, I tried renaming the redo.log already and restarting zimbra. That didn't seem to help. That would only help crashes at start up right? Not just when sending mail?

Should I be considering a reinstall of zimbra? Our network trial has another 30 days I think, after that we were going to get 50 licenses. That gives a me while longer to get this working, but not too much as we wanted a thorough test of the outlook-connector before we purchased.

Also, we have already integrated our samba domain into the LDAP tree, otherwise I would have tried a reinstall already.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

[soxfan]

In our case when there was an issue with the external MTA/SMTP server and Zimbra couldn't communicate with it this would basically "hose" Zimbra, and eventually tomcat would die. At that point the users would have issues regardless of who they were trying to send to.

I don't want to lead you astray, but the fact that you are getting the same error messages with nothing apparently wrong with your Zimbra server seems very much the same as the problem we experienced. If possible I would look at logs and whatnot on your external MTA server to see if it gives you any clues about what is going on.

[ndsharp]

I looked at the maillog on the mail relay and didn't see any attempts from zimbra to connect to it. Other than that I am not sure what to look for. I tried telling zimbra not to use the relay and deliver mail directly but that didn't help.



Thanks for the help.