We have a server hosted with Rackspace. On the server we host our website with very minimal MySQL usage, and also our email. We have 110 employees, each with email addresses. Most employees use Thunderbird or Outlook to retrieve their messages using POP. A handful of people use Squirrelmail (webmail) to view messages.
During the evening, mail retrieval is very fast. From any client I can hit "receive" and the server will connect, authenticate, and start retrieving messages in under 2 seconds.
During the day, when usage is higher, it takes clients up to 5 minutes to connect, and maybe 3 seconds to authenticate. Once that is done, the messages download very quickly. Sometimes, the IMAP clients (including Squirrelmail) timeout and refuse to connect.
Here is some more information:
Our Server Info:
-Redhat ES 2.1
-XINETD running ipop3d (unlimited connections)
-Sendmail 8.11.6
Other Info:
-We use a SPAM filtering service. We redirect all of our MX traffic to that service, and then messages are sent on to us. So, we receive only a handful of SPAM messages each day.
-We have tried restarting XINETD and Sendmail with no noticeable effect.
-It was suggested that we add a line to etc/hosts which resolves to our main office, from which most of our users connect. This has had no noticeable effect.
Please help us speed things up. What should we look at first? The popular belief around the office is that we should buy Exchange Server and our problems will magically go away. I don't think this is true, but tell me if I'm wrong.
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