neomail.pl sessions 99.9% cpu usage. --help?

[aboleth]

Ok... I've been having some weird problems with CPanel's spam and email. Most of which was pretty easy to solve. Thanks in part to the people on these forums. I have one problem left, and I must say, I'm kinda stumped. I have a user who logs into neomail with his default cpanel account. when he attempts to do this his IE hangs and eventually times out. Same thing happens from any computer that he tries to log in from. For now I have him using Horde and he's happy with that. the real problem is, when he tries to log into neomail with this account it kills the CPU on the CPanel server. If he clicks on the link several times.... several instances of this process show up when i use the "top" command when SSH'd into the server, below is an example, Mmpcmis is the user...

18015 mpcmis 18 0 8988 5340 1808 R 62.1 0.3 0:25.12 neomail.pl
18017 mpcmis 18 0 7932 5340 1808 R 62.1 0.3 0:21.76 neomail.pl
18019 mpcmis 18 0 7244 5340 1808 R 61.4 0.3 0:20.65 neomail.pl
18071 mpcmis 18 0 7324 5340 1808 R 61.4 0.3 0:10.95 neomail.pl
18060 mpcmis 18 0 7816 5340 1808 R 60.1 0.3 0:15.17 neomail.pl
18039 mpcmis 18 0 7436 5340 1808 R 58.4 0.3 0:17.57 neomail.pl
18136 root 16 0 9832 3796 2688 S 7.0 0.2 0:00.21 exim
18176 root 19 0 8680 3652 2592 R 2.7 0.2 0:00.08 exim
24943 root 16 0 5044 1456 1080 S 1.0 0.1 8:33.78 antirelayd
612 lcp 16 0 36692 29m 2320 S 1.0 1.5 2:00.78 spamd
18020 mailnull 15 0 9512 3672 2496 S 0.7 0.2 0:00.18 exim
31198 root 15 0 10388 9096 4552 S 0.3 0.4 1:20.61 cppop
4270 root 16 0 7048 2280 1828 S 0.3 0.1 0:00.51 sshd
14138 root 16 0 2464 988 744 R 0.3 0.0 0:02.43 top
18072 mailnull 16 0 9480 3568 2488 S 0.3 0.2 0:00.15 exim
1 root 16 0 2660 512 436 S 0.0 0.0 5:08.19 init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:12.96 migration/0
3 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.84 ksoftirqd/0
4 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:08.00 migration/1
5 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.58 ksoftirqd/1
6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 10:21.69 migration/2
7 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.73 ksoftirqd/2
8 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 5:22.95 migration/3
9 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.68 ksoftirqd/3
10 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04 events/0
11 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.06 events/1
12 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.05 events/2
13 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 events/3

As you can see, the MPCMIS user eats up all my processor when trying to log into neomail. I have to kill the processes and the server runs well after that. I'd rather not disable neomail, and at this point i'm very curious as to what can cause this problem. Also, the top command is impossibly showing that the mpcmis user is using 360% of the proc....(if you combine all those 60% processes). I realize thats not a cpanel issue I just found it amusing.

No other users under his domain are having this issue. So, if i can't figure out the root of the problem, is there a way I can recreate the root account for this domain without desroying his account totally? Thanks in advance for any replies!

[torwill]

I don't know how to resolve this, but I had this problem.

It usually happens when an inbox is full of mails (legitimate, or spam (mostly)). I used to have 'catch-all' on by default, and spam mails accumulate quickly. So, for all my new accounts, I have :fail: by default, it helps a bit.

[chican0]

I was wondering if anyone else had this problem.

I have run into this quite often in the past couple of months. I find that I need to check the load now and then to see if any neomail sessions are eating up the processor. As I find them, I issue a kill -9 process #

I hope someone with some technical know-how can shed some light on this and how to prevent future run-away neomail.pl sessions.

[duranduran]

Same problema here, without any solution.

[cpanelnick]

Switching to maildir will solve a lot of performance problems with mail, but neomail isn't supported with maildir.

[sparek-3]

I've found that this is sometimes caused by accounts being at or near their quota. I believe Neomail works by indexing the inbox and other mail folders. If the account is at or near its quota, then neomail is not able to index the files. Secondly, there appears to be some confusion in neomail as to whether the inbox for a mail account is called INBOX or inbox and this results in INBOX.db index files and inbox.db index files causing problems.

It basically boils down to Neomail is a very outdated piece of software. Its not actively developed and there are just better solutions. The squirrelmail offering in CPanel's webmail interface is a much better solution. Horde is good if you need an abudance of other task management applications. Both of these webmail suites work in a maildir format, which really is best for webmail.

My recommendation would be to move away from Neomail. Just how exactly you would accomplish that, I do not know. We are running into the same circumstances, where we have users who are using Neomail, and do not wish to change. Right now, I'm just basically discouraging our clients from using Neomail and warning that it may disappear at some later date, as we switch our servers over to maildir.

[driverC]

Maybe you guys can set up a cron job to automatically kill the process... Something like:

killall -s 9 neomail.pl

[cpanelnick]

/scripts/convert2maildir

[chican0]

/scripts/convert2maildir

Is there an explaination as to what that exactly does?

[sparek-3]

It converts your server over to using maildir mail formatting instead of mbox mail formatting.

Neomail does not work with Maildir, because Neomail only understands the mbox format. In simple terms, with mbox format, all mail is collected into a single file, a mailbox file. With maildir all mail is collected into a directory. Horde and Squirrelmail the other Webmail suites available from CPanel are basically just an IMAP frontend. That is, they don't care what mail format is being used, as long as the server they are connecting to (in this case it would be localhost, the server itself) is running an IMAP server that understands the background mail handling format.

Neomail does not work in this manner. Neomail accesses the files directly on the filesystem. While, I'm not doubting that Neomail could be rewritten to accomodate the maildir format, the simple truth is that Neomail is no longer being developed. Anything that is no longer being developed is generally a bad idea to continue to use. What does CPanel continue to leave Neomail as an option? For one reason, they are pushing more and more to the maildir formatting, which automatically deprecates Neomail. Secondly, I suppose they leave it because there are no doubt some users who still use Neomail, and weening those users off of Neomail is not really CPanel's job.

Neomail just really does not need to be used any more. I understand your predicament, we are facing the same thing with some of our clients. This still doesn't change the fact that Neomail doesn't really need to be used any more. This is like finding a bug in DOS 6 and trying to get Microsoft to fix it. Microsoft will tell you to upgrade or stop using DOS 6, but how do you explain that to your clients who are still using DOS 6? I don't know, its just a balancing act. But ultimately if you want to resolve the bug, or in this case the Neomail processes, you need to upgrade or switch to something different.

Feel free to correct me if any of my explanations are off.

Hope this helps.

[chican0]

Very nice!

Thank you for that explaination. I appreciate your time to bring it to the level of understanding for some of us 'novice' peoples.