SM freezing on rare occasion

Question asked by Matthew Titley - 1/23/2024 at 10:59 AM

Answered

Hi all. Asking the community for opinions and advice. I've opened tickets on this rare issue in the past, and SmarterTools support has been attentive to the tickets, but it still occurs, albeit rarely.

Yesterday, a few customers called/texted that they couldn't get mail. I attempted to login to the SM server and it was practically frozen. It took about ten minutes just to login and get to taskmgr. SM service was using 99% memory (19GB) but relatively low CPU (24%) so I killed the process and restarted SM. Problem resolved. Today, server is chugging along just fine and SM service is using 5GB memory which is average daily usage.

My hunch is that MAPI is causing this but I have no real evidence to support the thesis. This is my hunch because in that prior to MAPI (two/three years ago?) this never happened in the almost 16 years of SmarterMail usage. In 2022 it happened and ST recommended adding memory so I upped it from 16gb to 20gb. In 2023 the recommendation was to update to latest build which upgraded from 8251 to 8601. Another recommendation was to install and run a dotmemory and dotTrace diagnostic tool when the memory hits 99% but at 99% memory the server is generally unresponsive and the overriding need is to get mail services back up and running ASAP. So, what recommendations does the SM community have?

Server is Win2012R2 (yeah I know... new server is on the docket)

8 vCPUs, 20GB memory, plenty of disk space.

Build 8601, roughly 350 active accounts, 100 MAPI, 40ish ActiveSync, the rest IMAP/webmail.

Thanks for any thoughts.

Matt

8 Replies

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echoDreamz Replied

1/23/2024 at 11:09 PM

Short of getting a trace, finding out what it is, is going to be hard, if not impossible... is more RAM available? I dont know if it's an option (ST devs will have to chime in), but would a windows process dump help isolate the issue?

Joshua Rosen Replied

1/30/2025 at 1:42 PM

I too have been having this problem for a long time and ive tried everything under the planet to resolve but no luck. Have you ever resolved this on your end?

I also never experienced this issue until an upgrade we did last year, which sounds like you might be onto something.

Thanks!

Kyle Kerst Replied

1/30/2025 at 3:05 PM

Employee Post Marked As Answer

Do you find any errors in the SmarterMail logging referencing corrupt or missing/unreadable GRP files? We have seen instances in the past where a corrupted GRP file causes an email client to continually request the file contents again and again, never quite completing the request, and this will lead to increased resource usage as the server contends with those requests. Slower disks would likely contribute further to this as well, so you may be able to confirm by watching disk queues before/during/after those events as well.

For resource issues I typically recommend setting up a monitoring system like PRTG and configuring it to monitor as many data points as possible for a little while including .NET application pool counters so I can monitor the environment conditions even when Windows has become unresponsive itself. This will allow you to track other data points like connection counts, disk queues, etc which makes putting a picture together a lot easier.

Let us know what you find out and we'll be happy to help point you in the right direction :)

Kyle Kerst Lead Internal Network/System Administrator SmarterTools Inc. smartertools.com

Joshua Rosen Replied

1/30/2025 at 3:18 PM

Thank you for your input!

I do not believe it is a resource issue, we have a powerhouse of a server specifically installed that was meant to try and resolve this issue.

I DO however see GRP errors, here is an example of one:

[2025.01.29] 12:55:53.058 GetProtocolAttachments Exception Info Stored: E:/SmarterMail/Domains/domain.com/Users/username/Mail/Inbox/2024_2_21.grp:27753 | Exception: System.FormatException: Failed to parse message headers.

Is there an easy way to scan and fix these corruptions?

Joshua Rosen Replied

1/30/2025 at 3:20 PM

Also I will note, we've run chkdsk and various other disk utilities to make sure it's not corrupt. To add to that, i've tried 3 different storage solutions.

Douglas Foster Replied

1/30/2025 at 6:17 PM

You said it is not a resource issue, but it certainly can be.

Our system will bog down when the spool gets big. This has happened when a message to all employees has a large attachment.

It happened on another occasion when a spammer decided to flood us with many messages. He used a repeat loop that overcame our throttling, until we blocked the IP address at our firewall.

We may be under-configured on CPU, but the problem does not occur often enough to justify taking resources from other servers on the same virtual hosting platform.

Matthew Titley Replied

1/30/2025 at 7:04 PM

Hi, all. My original post was from January 2024. The freezing hasn’t happened again in at least 8 months, and a number of SM upgrades since. It might have been a bug in 8601, or a corruption, but it sure seems to be gone so I’ll mark this as solved. Frankly, I had forgotten all about this forum thread!

Zach Sylvester Replied

1/30/2025 at 7:28 PM

Employee Post

Hello,

Thanks for posting about this issue. Firstly, I would recommend updating to the newest version. Not only does it run on the latest .NET version with memory improvements, but there have also been numerous performance tweaks and optimizations.

The issue here is most likely that SmarterMail is consuming all available RAM, causing Windows to use the page file, which is significantly slower. The other issue is that even if you provided a dotMemory trace, it's too outdated for us to debug effectively. Since your version was released, we've made numerous changes, and the code no longer aligns with the memory trace. Additionally, we've fixed two or three memory leaks in more recent versions.

That being said, if you can reproduce this issue on the latest version and provide a new dotMemory trace, we can analyze it and determine what’s happening.

If you have any questions about upgrading or would like paid assistance, I recommend opening a support ticket, and we’d be happy to help.

Kind regards,

Zach Sylvester Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

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