slow / sluggish response, high mem usage on 3.0.1 GA

[bbska]

Hey there,

I'm experiencing some issues with Zimbra where it will become very sluggish ( we're talking 30 seconds to load pages in some cases, at best 8-10 seconds to get some things going) and occasionally the web interface will stop responding alltogether. This is over DSL in most cases, but has also occured over a 100mbps ethernet connection as well.

cat /proc/meminfo shows that only ~ 140 megs of physical memory is available. The server is a 2.8ghz Pentium IV with 3gigs of ddr2 memory, sata150 hard disks in a raid array.

top shows that two processes , zimbra Java and Zimbra mysqld both have virtual memory images of over a gigabyte apiece. ( 1181megs for java and 1058 for mysqld )

I'm guessing that has something to do with the slugishness, but I'm still new enough to zimbra to not be sure of what I can do.

I'm open to suggestions.

[KevinH]

In general we configure MySQL and Tomcat (java) to take a significant % of the total system memory to increase caching. So it's normal to see a large memory footprint for these when you've got so much RAM on the machine.

Are there any other applications running on the machine. What's the CPU usage like(any IO wait?)? What operations do you see this on? How many user's are on the system? Are they all using the web interface?

Anything in the logs?

[bbska]

Originally Posted by KevinH

In general we configure MySQL and Tomcat (java) to take a significant % of the total system memory to increase caching. So it's normal to see a large memory footprint for these when you've got so much RAM on the machine.

Are there any other applications running on the machine. What's the CPU usage like(any IO wait?)? What operations do you see this on? How many user's are on the system? Are they all using the web interface?

Anything in the logs?

Currently running applications (all non-zimbra):

Apahce2(httpd)
MysqlD
Tomcat

Aside from Zimbra related processes and applications, Apache2 takes up the second largest chunk of memory, followed by tomcat and then mysqld


There does not appear to be any I/O wait happening... we've got everything on a sata raid array.

There doesn't appear to be anything unusual in the logs, though without knowing specifically where to look and what to look for it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack blindfolded and with both arms behind my back.

There are only 8 employees here, and possibly a total of 25 ( and that's being generous) actual email accounts.

only one or two use the webmail interface, the rest use thunderbird.

We're contemplating moving zimbra off to another server to free up memory on this main webserver.

the other server only has 2 gigs of ram, though, and if one with three gigs can't handle it we're worried about 2 gigs. I've read plenty of reports from people about zimbra being incredibly snappy and fast... we've never had that be the case here, so I'm hoping something is wrong that can be fixed and our experience will be much better.

[bbska]

Originally Posted by KevinH

In general we configure MySQL and Tomcat (java) to take a significant % of the total system memory to increase caching. So it's normal to see a large memory footprint for these when you've got so much RAM on the machine.

I can see some positives and some negatives to this. The main negatives I'm seeing are that on systems where zimbra is not the only thing running zimbra can hog resources since it's set up to, by default, take a significant portion of the available memory. This deprives the other applications of memory and can cause the system to slow to a crawl.

Is there any way to limit the amount of memory zimbra uses?

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by bbska

I can see some positives and some negatives to this. The main negatives I'm seeing are that on systems where zimbra is not the only thing running zimbra can hog resources since it's set up to, by default, take a significant portion of the available memory. This deprives the other applications of memory and can cause the system to slow to a crawl.

Is there any way to limit the amount of memory zimbra uses?

Zimbra assumes it's the only application. So my guess is running the other apps are starving the total system of RAM and forcing zimbra and the other apps to use swap. You should use zmlocalconfig to lower the ram percentages for tomcat/java and mysql. I'd also experiment with zimbra with your other applications off. My guess is under both those conditions you'll see a much happier system. Our internal mail server has only local disk and 2GB RAM, but with dual 2.8GHz cpus and works fine for a much larger group of folks who are very very heavy mail users most with multiple GB mailboxes.

[zimbra@mail ~]$ zmlocalconfig |grep mem
mysql_memory_percent = 40
tomcat_java_heap_memory_percent = 30

[bbska]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Zimbra assumes it's the only application. So my guess is running the other apps are starving the total system of RAM and forcing zimbra and the other apps to use swap. You should use zmlocalconfig to lower the ram percentages for tomcat/java and mysql. I'd also experiment with zimbra with your other applications off. My guess is under both those conditions you'll see a much happier system. Our internal mail server has only local disk and 2GB RAM, but with dual 2.8GHz cpus and works fine for a much larger group of folks who are very very heavy mail users most with multiple GB mailboxes.

[zimbra@mail ~]$ zmlocalconfig |grep mem
mysql_memory_percent = 40
tomcat_java_heap_memory_percent = 30

Thanks Kevin

Ideally I would love to have a seperate server just to handle mail, but we can't practically do that right now. What I do plan on doing is moving zimbra to a secondary machine that, while it is running other services they are non-essential. That will free up the memory we absolutely have to have on our primary webserver. I will then do the suggested config changes to keep zimbra "under control" when it comes to using memory and see if that helps the overall system performance. Hopefully that willl give us a much nicer balance.

I'll post results here when I've completed these things.

[bbska]

Thanks again Kevin, I modified those values and have regained control of the system memory. It's been running for a while now with the new settings and is going strong and its memory usage is holding stable at a much more sane level.

Things seem to respond fairly well now too.

[travisbell]

Hey guys, maybe I missed something but how does one edit these settings? I am new to the Zimbra system so please, be kind!

Thanks!

[scalper]

# su - zimbra
# zmlocalconfig mysql_memory_percent "40"
# zmlocalconfig tomcat_java_heap_memory_percent "30"

adjust the values to ur needs..

[zzzzsg]

hi

the command does not work



[zimbra@mail ~]$ zmlocalconfig mysql_memory_percent "30"
Warning: null valued key '30'
mysql_memory_percent = 40
You have new mail in /var/spool/mail/zimbra

Originally Posted by scalper

# su - zimbra
# zmlocalconfig mysql_memory_percent "40"
# zmlocalconfig tomcat_java_heap_memory_percent "30"

adjust the values to ur needs..