Plusnet Service

Customers are reporting delays when sending email. This primarily seems to be reports that email simply isn't turning up or that extensive delays are being experienced with the relay servers despite there being no obvious problems with the queues.

If you were logged in to the portal, you could associate your username with this problem.

Problem has been passed to a network engineer for investigation.

Problem has been identified with our outbound relay servers so this will be affecting email that is sent via our outgoing mail servers.

Problem seems to be centred around database access errors.

Stopping the service, removing and restarting the database should help alleviate the problem. We also need to consider separating some of the database files.

Two additional relay servers are being built to increase the capacity of the platform. A lot of the examples that have been reported relate to one particular server that is using a high volume of system resources.

The building of the two additional servers is now complete. We are conducting testing and raising change control to make the necessary network changes.

One of the servers now racked. Second server to be installed early tomorrow.

Testing of the first server will start this evening. Load balancer changes also to be completed tomorrow.

Both servers now racked and ready for testing.

As part of this work we have moved the database from disk to ram and the errors we were seeing (of which there were thousands) have since subsided. The last time this error was occurred was around midday today.

Testing of the new servers is underway.

Monitoring suggests that email after midday today should not be getting delayed. Downgrading for monitoring over the weekend.