New FreeBSD 5.3 e-mail server extremely slow...

We upgraded from a dual 1.66GHz AMD running FreeBSD 4.7
and a dual 3GHz Xeon running FreeBSD 5.3 and the new server
is painfully slow, even after turning spamassassin
and yavr (yet another virus recipe) off. Load
appears to be imapd/ipop3d (uw-imapd) related.
New server is Adaptec SCSI RAID, old one was 3ware ATA RAID,
but disk load is relatively low anyway.

It is a fairly high volume server, maybe 150,000 messages
per day and 150,000 pop/imap sessions per day. But the old
box was doing relatively fine.

Turning off hyperthreading helped alot, but not enough.

load average is around 48 now, I've set the 2 sendmail
conf load av settings to 48 so at least e-mail gets in.

A quick truss of an ipop3d process shows piles
of this streaming by...

setitimer(0,{0 0, 0 0},{0 0, 599 929999}) = 0 (0x0)
write(1,0x805a000,21) = 21 (0x15)
gettimeofday({1104857422 906783},0x0) = 0 (0x0)
setitimer(0,{0 0, 600 0},{0 0, 0 0}) = 0 (0x0)
read(0x0,0x8063000,0x832c) = 10 (0xa)
setitimer(0,{0 0, 0 0},{0 0, 600 0}) = 0 (0x0)
write(1,0x805a000,14) = 14 (0xe)
gettimeofday({1104857422 908916},0x0) = 0 (0x0)
setitimer(0,{0 0, 600 0},{0 0, 0 0}) = 0 (0x0)

top shows 80-90% "system" activity.

About to revert to our old box and maybe nfs mount
/var/mail to make it less painless. Any suggestions ?

--
Bruce Campbell
Engineering Computing
CPH-2374B
University of Waterloo
(519)888-4567 ext 5889

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