D Host - Web Hosting & Domain Name Registration

Announcements

Titan Server Load Spikes Identified and Addressed

20/09/2011 22:30

Customers on our Titan server may have noticed a few short outages late last week as we were forced to power down and then restart the server as a result of extreme load spikes (Up to 90 CPUs) which were causing the server to lock.

On Friday afternoon, the cause of the spikes was identified as being the MailScanner email filtering system. In certain situations the software began to loop, resulting in a sharp and dramatic increase in disk activity which created the inordinate server load. We upgraded the SpamAssassin component to the latest version, removed a number of older rule files that were no longer required, adjusted the file attachment processing settings and have since been monitoring the server closely.

There have been no re-occurances of the load peaks since these measures were taken so it appears that the issue has been successfully addressed. We will continue to monitor the situation and will respond rapidly (as we did last week) should the problem re-appear.

We apologize for any inconvenience experienced as a result of the brief outages last week.