Sites continue to go down - IMAP the reason

[ZeroXcape]

Hello,

For the last 6 days, my sites have continued to go offline due to too many imap processes being in use.

I have 13 e-mail accounts across 7 users. Everyone sits with their Outlook/Thunderbird client on throughout the day. I would think that this isn't close to enough use that it should prevent my websites from being shown, but Bluehost technical support has told me that too many imapd processes are running and it's leading to the 501 errors on my web. When I killall -9 imapd, the sites come back online. Unfortunately, I have to do this every 5 minutes.

I've spoke with 5-6 consultants about this and the best suggestion that I've received to date is don't use imap or create a cronjob that kills imapd every five minutes.

I have asked our seven e-mail users to change their outlook/thunderbird clients from checking their mail every 10 minutes to ever 20 minutes - but that has done nothing.

Has anyone else run into this problem on Bluehost? Any solution would be great. We have quite a bit of PPC ads that are pointing to nothing half the time.

Thanks,

zX

[rosenjon]

When you say "Go Down", can you clarify what is happening? Are you getting High CPU error messages in your high cpu error log? If so, this would confirm that BH has messed something up in their high CPU auditing. The techs swear up and down that nothing has changed, but if your EMAIL server is going down, there is a serious problem somewhere......

[ds4081]

Thats not the email server going down, thats his imap processes using up all his processes he is allowed. maybe changer your imap timeout lower on your client. Or hopefully there is something on bluehost end that can fix this, but it sounds like your imap sessions are constantly open, that might be nice, but in a shared hosting environment its not ideal. You should have it check maybe every 15 minutes, and timeout every 30 to 90 seconds.

[John]

Mail servers should be on separate servers, CPU errors for that is ridiculous.

I have 2500 e-mail accounts available on my BH account, it's impossible to actually use them, if anyone actually wanted to "check" mail.

Process limitations are too strict, too many people packed on one box.

Why have 2500 e-mail accounts, 50 MySql db's, 50 Postgre db's, 300 GB of space, 3,000 gb's of bandwidth and all the other crap that sounds good, if you can't use 10 e-mail accounts at the same time without the CPU limit being hit.

When 5+ of my users run an e-mail program, and I have more than 20 people on my site, I get CPU errors. That's not right.

And it's not a MySql problem, or bad code.

:cool:

[CTYankee]

I have a similar problem. My ~7 email accounts prevent my scripts from running sometimes. How can I kill these processes short of opening and closeing Mail every time I want to check email?

[akmedia]

Just want to echo the concern and posted similar to another thread.

Whoever said that mail should be on a separate server and not count toward total processes running is right on!

Bluehost really needs to address this problem.

[Ferdinand]

It's probably not the solution you are looking for, but Google APPS (Google Mail using your domain name) introduced IMAP today. I just found this announcement from Google Apps in my inbox:


The Gmail team is thrilled to announce the launch of IMAP support for Gmail, which lets you use your Google Apps email at work, in your car, or just about anywhere, on any device, while keeping information synced across all devices so that whatever you do in one place shows up everywhere else you might access your email. Instead of using POP, which isn't able to sync changes made made on other devices with your online email, now you can configure IMAP for your account and enjoy the improved experience.

I am using Google Apps since a few months. It is extremely comfortable and easy to administer. Since we have Google Apps the Spam problem has been reduced to almost zero (ca. 1 Spam email every two days in my inbox, ca. 1 false positive every two-three weeks). It is far superior to Horde or Squirrel and the free anti-spam solutions anyway (I don't know about Postini).

The only problem I came across so far is the a limit of sending 500 emails per account per day.

And of course, there is the major question, if you want to move your emails to a company like Google, which is making a living by collecting information about its users...

[akmedia]

Thanks for the reply.

I found this on a BlueHost competitor call U2-Web:


Ever been on a server that has been slashdotted and your mail doesn't work or is very slow? Our clustered services eliminate that. If one service spikes in usage, the other services aren't affected at all.

They, and other hosts, don't put all their services on one box, meaning that IMAP usage doesn't affect PHP or CGI services.

I should NOT have to choose between checking my email or having my CGI scripts break down!

If I am forced to move hosts I will move both my Web and email hosting away from BlueHost!

[felgall]

You get what you pay for. Shared hosting such as BlueHost are extremely cheap because they put everything for an account in the same place. If you want the services separated then find a host that does it that way. Of course they will charge a lot more because they will need more servers for the same number of accounts.

[Arubalisa]

Just want to echo the concern and posted similar to another thread.

Whoever said that mail should be on a separate server and not count toward total processes running is right on!

Bluehost really needs to address this problem.DITTO! Same sentiments here.