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By Krista Olmstead - February 18, 2009
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Dalhousie email has been having difficulties. We understand the current level is insufficient to conduct business. We regret the problems and would like to shed some light on what is happening.
Email traffic has increased significantly since Christmas. Although some was anticipated, traffic exceeded expectations. To deal with this, a previously planned major upgrade has been moved ahead of schedule. The problems may continue for this week, but additional server capacity will be added this weekend to remedy the situation. We have postponed some of the university’s regular mass emails to be delivered at night instead of during the busiest times of the day.
In addition to this, over the next two months, we will continue to add capacity to the service to meet current and future needs of the university. Additionally, we’ll be engaging the campus community to explore alternative email and communication tools.
In the mean time, there are a few things everyone can do to help all of us get through the next week. The greatest load on the system appears to be between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., at the highest email peaks. For this week only, if you can avoid email during those times, this will help. Also for this week, we will be turning off service to Blackberrys during the 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. period.
We are aware that email is crucial to your work. It is our highest priority to restore email to optimal conditions.
Krista Olmstead handles communications and marketing for Information Technology Services (ITS).
Readers Say
February 18, 2009 4:01 PM
1. Our current email server is a 4 dual threaded cores running at 2.7 Ghz with 16 MB RAM and has two 1GB connections to our SAN.
2. This weekend we plan to replace the server with 8 dual threaded cores with 32 GB RAM and give it two 4 GB connections to our SAN. (For those of you who understand that.) This will approximately double the processing power and throughput of our email system (it’s not linear)
3. Longer term, over the next two months, we will migrate email to a new configuration for email delivery involving six new servers where we currently have one.
4. Tues 17 Feb the IMAP server was rebooted. This eliminated many "orphaned" processes that would not normally matter but slowed the system down until they were cleaned up.
5. Sessions on IMAP are being controlled at manageable level.
6. We are script clearing old IMAP processes.
7. Spam is being controlled with more aggressive setting.
8. Monitoring, and system logs have been minimized on the IMAP server and this function has been moved to other servers.
9. Some of the University's mass emails are being postponed until the evening.
(The above was written by our Director. If you didn't understand some of that and want clarification on the details, please let me know and I will be happy to translate it in English.)
Thanks,
-Krista
February 18, 2009 4:01 PM
1. Our current email server is a 4 dual threaded cores running at 2.7 Ghz with 16 MB RAM and has two 1GB connections to our SAN.
2. This weekend we plan to replace the server with 8 dual threaded cores with 32 GB RAM and give it two 4 GB connections to our SAN. (For those of you who understand that.) This will approximately double the processing power and throughput of our email system (it’s not linear)
3. Longer term, over the next two months, we will migrate email to a new configuration for email delivery involving six new servers where we currently have one.
4. Tues 17 Feb the IMAP server was rebooted. This eliminated many "orphaned" processes that would not normally matter but slowed the system down until they were cleaned up.
5. Sessions on IMAP are being controlled at manageable level.
6. We are script clearing old IMAP processes.
7. Spam is being controlled with more aggressive setting.
8. Monitoring, and system logs have been minimized on the IMAP server and this function has been moved to other servers.
9. Some of the University's mass emails are being postponed until the evening.
(The above was written by our Director. If you didn't understand some of that and want clarification on the details, please let me know and I will be happy to translate it in English.)
Thanks,
-Krista
February 18, 2009 8:31 PM
I'm curious as to what the difference is between email in 2008 and email in 2009. From what I can recall everything started to slow down in mid-January, and it has gotten progressivly worse over the last four weeks. Is it the volume of email? Attachments? Spam? Did something on the server change? Blaming bulk emailing doesn't seem to make sense, as they never caused problems before.
February 18, 2009 8:31 PM
I'm curious as to what the difference is between email in 2008 and email in 2009. From what I can recall everything started to slow down in mid-January, and it has gotten progressivly worse over the last four weeks. Is it the volume of email? Attachments? Spam? Did something on the server change? Blaming bulk emailing doesn't seem to make sense, as they never caused problems before.
February 18, 2009 10:45 PM
We are not blaming mass emails. They are just one way among the others listed above that we are testing to see if it improves the situation.
We are not entirely sure what is causing the difficulties. We have been running tests on all of the systems. Email use has doubled since December but we have experienced these kinds of loads before, such as in September registration periods, and have not had this kind of breakdown. We do know that more people are connecting from wireless connections than ever before, and that Blackberrys appear to be about 25% of the usage, which is a huge increase.
Other than that, I can't give any more definite answers until our technicians have more information.
We will be keeping everyone updated as we get news. We are planning to give daily updates until this is resolved. I hope this means only two more updates. You will hear from me soon.
-Krista
February 19, 2009 12:17 AM
February 19, 2009 12:17 AM
February 19, 2009 7:34 AM
Dal mail has always been slow, cumbersome, and hard to manage. Not to mention we don't have nearly enough storage space. I've been migrating my dal emails to my Gmail account for the last year and it has worked fantastically. Dal might think about investing into Google Apps for their email.
February 19, 2009 11:59 AM
February 19, 2009 12:32 PM
February 19, 2009 12:32 PM
February 19, 2009 12:39 PM
As well, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Google's (and, by extension, GMail's) terms of service give Google the right to search through your email ad send you targeted advertising. I tend to recommend to people that they stay away from "free" webmail services as a result.
February 19, 2009 12:39 PM
As well, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Google's (and, by extension, GMail's) terms of service give Google the right to search through your email ad send you targeted advertising. I tend to recommend to people that they stay away from "free" webmail services as a result.
February 19, 2009 1:16 PM
February 20, 2009 12:42 AM
February 20, 2009 1:01 AM
February 20, 2009 1:01 AM
February 20, 2009 1:16 AM
It's funny that we pay $8,000 a semester and can't get the features of a free email account available from Gmail or Hotmail. Most universities wouldn't have to mention this problem, they would realize it without needing to survey students and just FIX IT! That's clearly too much to ask. Please send more surveys about the issue, its definitely necessary.
February 20, 2009 6:16 AM
February 20, 2009 8:04 AM
It's unfortunate to hear about the provincial legislation, but Johnathan is right - with the amount of tuition we're paying there has got to be a better solution. I despise logging into WebCT/BLS as well, (prefers IE over FIREFOX??) which is necessary for most students who check their dal email accounts, and is always painfully slow and freezy. I haven't heard of a single student who likes using it.
February 20, 2009 9:30 AM
February 20, 2009 9:30 AM
February 20, 2009 11:59 AM
Since Dal implemented a spam filter that intercepts messages "identified" as spam I lost several legitimate messages. As these messages are deleted and not stored in a spam folder I learned about this only by coincidence, i.e. people asked my why I did not respond to their message. As user I have no means to influence the settings of this initial spam filter. That this filter is highly efficient, sometimes a bit to aggressive, is pretty obvious by the small number of messages that end up in the spam folder controlled by user settings. Most of these are not even spam.
I hope more aggressive spam filtering in the future does not mean that the loss of legitimate messages will further increase, making communication by email a gamble. Given the fact that a lot of business communication is done by email and not just social chatting this would be highly undesirable.
Bottom line is, reading between the lines, that IT infrastructure improvements were long overdue to meet the increased demand on the Dal email system by its users.
February 20, 2009 11:59 AM
Since Dal implemented a spam filter that intercepts messages "identified" as spam I lost several legitimate messages. As these messages are deleted and not stored in a spam folder I learned about this only by coincidence, i.e. people asked my why I did not respond to their message. As user I have no means to influence the settings of this initial spam filter. That this filter is highly efficient, sometimes a bit to aggressive, is pretty obvious by the small number of messages that end up in the spam folder controlled by user settings. Most of these are not even spam.
I hope more aggressive spam filtering in the future does not mean that the loss of legitimate messages will further increase, making communication by email a gamble. Given the fact that a lot of business communication is done by email and not just social chatting this would be highly undesirable.
Bottom line is, reading between the lines, that IT infrastructure improvements were long overdue to meet the increased demand on the Dal email system by its users.
February 26, 2009 8:38 PM
February 26, 2009 8:38 PM