What is Zimbra doing when it is idle?

[Podilarius]

I am new to Zimbra and I have gotten a new server going with 5.02. No emails are currently going to this box. I was hoping to move to it soon. I am concerned about what Zimbra is doing when it should be idle. I see a load average of .6 .3 .3 with nothing else running and the task from top -c is the zimbra java (tomcat). So I am just curious, what is Zimbra doing when it should be idle? Why would I not see a load averae of 0 0 0?

Podilarius

[phoenix]

Welcome to the forums.

Various things will be running on your server such as , the scheduling of tasks to make sure Zimbra services are OK, timed task for cleaning mailboxes etc. to name but two. There's nothing to worry about and Zimbra doesn't actually do 'nothing' when there's no mail coming in.

[Podilarius]

I see that there are scheduled tasks. I see when they run, but there is a constant process that is always running, as if it were a game server, and it is always using processing power. I have run postfix mail servers for years and they only show process when mail is being processed. There is no mail going to this box yet, test or otherwise. What is it doing and why is it taking up 15% of my memory?

Podilarius

[p24t]

Well, it depends on the box you have it on. The main ZCS box here at work tends to sit at 0,0,0. It's a heavy duty server, probably more than we need to run Zimbra, which is good.

Now my Zimbra server at home is running on an old system. It's load is constantly .4-.8 or more. When I do things it goes up a bit. Now, this is a very old system, with little memory in it.

One way or the other, there's processes constantly running using CPU and memory, it just depends on how much you have to give it, whether you notice or not.

[Podilarius]

It is a P4 system with a GB of memory. Unfortunately it is only single threaded and will run SMB and a NWN game server. The game server will run the CPU at 18 - 40% and 100% when loading. It will also be serving out DNS. This has been enough to run this for more than 6 years through varying OS versions. I was just curious as to what Zimbra was doing. Now I am also guessing that I can modify the times at which the heavy ones start.

Podilarius

[dwmtractor]

You can also satisfy your curiosity by running top from the command prompt. It'll tell you what processes are running and what resources they are consuming.

There are other Linux utilities that can do similar things tho none come to mind at the moment, but that's one of the things the open source world is really full of, is utilities for peering under the hood!

Oh, and by the way, your 1GB of memory may be part of the problem. Zimbra plays a whole lot nicer with 2GB--even on a small server with one user. That same 2GB will support you fine up to a decent production environment, but even for the "base install" less than 2 results in a performance hit.

Cheers,

Dan

[Podilarius]

That is something I will think about. I have been wanting to increase the memory for a while. Along with swapping out the MB. What I am seeing is that even though I modified the /var/spool/zimbra and installed the changes, the Apache Tomcat process that zimbra uses jumps to >50% for a few seconds and then drops off.
This is one that I have caught. I do not see where this is running from:
/opt/zimbra/java/bin/java -client -Xmx256m -Dzimbra.home=/opt/zimbra -Djava.library.path=/opt
/zimbra/lib -Djava.ext.dirs=/opt/zimbra/java/jre/lib/ext:/opt/zimbra/lib/jars:/opt/zimbra/lib/ext:/opt/zimbra/lib/ext/clamscanner com.zimbra.cs.account.ProvUt
il -l garpu

Where is this starting every minute?

[dwmtractor]

I don't know most of those. . .will have to defer to the advanced gearheads on the group. . .but clamscanner is ClamAV which is the antivirus scanner.

[Podilarius]

Thanks. I am linux savvy. I am just looking for the "how to tune the bad boy" so that stuff I don't care about running is stopped. Like I don't need for clam av to update every minute (or what ever this thing does). It is just not that important to me since I have Outlook that is also scanning. The web interface is nice, but I don't really use it. I am going to keep it going, because I do use it as a backup, but hopefully i can find how to make that http only and not ajax.
I am still learning this, so bear with me.