We are running exim and noticed that mail was not working both in and out this morning. Went in to investigate in WHM and found over 3000 messages in the queue (about 1500-2000 being spam), some of the messages were 6 days old. We were able to remove the messages in the queue. But now we often see the server bogg down almost to a stop. We are able to SSH into the server and find exim running a few different processes taking up huge amounts of CPU time. I saw the server load become stable at 50 (yes 50.0) and saw it peak to over 70. Our server load has never been over 3 in the past.
We are able to check exims queue and there are only 3 or 4 messages in there, why is the server working so hard?
