DukeMail stable after recent delays
Up to 25 percent of DukeMail users have seen degraded performance, such as delays in delivery of mail and error messages in connection with sending mail, for the last 24 hours. Maintenance work begun late in the night on Tuesday, May 3, into Wednesday morning has stabilized the system; as a result, similar issues have not developed today. We closed the IT Alert "DukeMail performance" at noon on Wednsday, May 4.
Note that these problems are connected to DukeMail (Sun Mail); the Microsoft Exchange environment has not been affected at all.
The service degradations are related to the growing size of DukeMail data on file. We believe the maintenance we did Tuesday night will keep the system stable for the weeks ahead, although the nature of this problem means that we can't rule out further unforeseen outages. Relatively soon after final examinations and commencement, we will reconfigure DukeMail storage to reduce the size of each storage volume and distribute mail accounts across a number of newly created volumes, as recommended by our mail service vendor.
During that forthcoming work, DukeMail users may see additional service degradations occasionally, and as that work is being done, up to 25 percent of users will each encounter a brief period when their mail accounts will be unavailable during scheduled evening or overnight maintenance windows.
As always, we will keep you informed about unplanned service degradations and planned maintenance windows through the IT Alerts feeds (see IT Alerts and Updates for information on subscribing, and look for the orange exclamation point in the left-hand margin of this site for open alerts). And of course, if you have a questions about OIT services, please contact the OIT Service Desk via email, phone, live chat or online form.