What is tailwatchd for?

[sadasiva]

I'm using a new VPS with Centos 5x & cPanel/WHM 11 in it.

Yesterday evening the VPS was severely over-loaded and crashed twice.

I found out that process named "tailwatchd" was overloading the server very badly. It was using very high CPU and about 60% of memory.

As soon I disabled tailwatchd (TailWatch Drivers: Antirelayd, ChkServd, cPBandwd & Eximstats), the server was back to normal.

I disabled this through WHM > Service Configuration > Service Manager

The VPS has been working nice since then and no probs till now. No overloading at all.

A few hours back, I enabled tailwatchd and only selected ChkServd under it (after reading in a forum that it was important to enable ChkServd). It was successful and the VPS has not over-loaded.

So the over-loading must be due to the other 3 processes - Antirelayd, cPBandwd & Eximstats.

Now I want to know if these 3 are so important or not?

We use the VPS for shared hosting purpose.

Kindly can anyone tell me what ready does Antirelayd, cPBandwd & Eximstats do? I searched the entire forum and could not find relevant info.

In particular 1 imp question, is cPBandwd a program which calculates the total bandwidth (data transfer) used up by the hosting accounts in the server? Or it only calculates bandwidth of emails sent and received.

Sorry, I'm getting confused a lot.

Please help.

[chinmay]

Hi,

TailWatchd processes logs from cPanel. Previously, three daemons were used to gather information from mail and bandwidth logs (antirelayd, eximstats and cpbandwd). These daemons have been deprecated and TailWatchd is launched which is more robust. The new system will reduce load due to log processing and allows for a more robust interface with the daemon. This daemon with all three log processing drivers uses less memory.

Hope this helps

Chinmay

[sadasiva]

Thanks for your reply. I understood that part now.

However what exactly will happen if I disable cpbandwd from the server?

1. Will it stop calculating the total data transfer (bandwidth) used by the hosting accounts in the server? Or just the email bandwidth?

2. antirelayd & eximstats seems to be related to email. So I don't think disabling it will be any problem. Am I correct?

As we are using the server for shared hosting purpose, monitoring total data transfer of each account is required.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi,

TailWatchd processes logs from cPanel. Previously, three daemons were used to gather information from mail and bandwidth logs (antirelayd, eximstats and cpbandwd). These daemons have been deprecated and TailWatchd is launched which is more robust. The new system will reduce load due to log processing and allows for a more robust interface with the daemon. This daemon with all three log processing drivers uses less memory.

Hope this helps

Chinmay

[Spiral]

Yesterday evening the VPS was severely over-loaded and crashed twice.

Well that much is not surprising

Check your logs and make sure none are unusually large ...

/var/log
/usr/local/apache/logs
/usr/local/apache/domlogs
/usr/local/cpanel/logs

[sadasiva]

Thanks for your reply.

Here are the log size:

17M /usr/local/apache/logs
45M /usr/local/apache/domlogs
12M /usr/local/cpanel/logs
34M /var/log

I don't think any of these are unusually large.

Any help?

Well that much is not surprising

Check your logs and make sure none are unusually large ...

/var/log
/usr/local/apache/logs
/usr/local/apache/domlogs
/usr/local/cpanel/logs

[chinmay]

Hi,

What you can do here is configure logs to process at night OR non business hours. Also check as to how often Bandwidth and Log Processing Frequency is set to.