To: Sugar Development Team
From: International Trade Fair Marketing; Germany

As we have to handle a lot of contact in our company and are in need of making mass mailings we have decided at the beginning of this year to integrate Sugar CRM in our office. For customization and set-up of Sugar CRM on our LAMP server we have chosen a Partner here in Germany to fulfill these tasks. The Sugar version is 4.5.1d. In the process of tuning the system for optimal performance we have followed a check list provided by the Sugar partner.

On the 10th of December we proceeded to execute our first mass mailing to 2200 contacts containing a Pdf attachment of 345 KB. The mail contained three links and the obligatory opt-out link. The sending per batch was set at 500 mails and unfortunately the box “keep a copy of every message” was checked.

The mailing went out on Monday morning. Subsequently things got very bad and ended by killing the entire server. In detailed the 15GB mail server (99% free space) ran out of space within a few minutes. After blasting the mail server the remaining partitions were written full with data not even making hold at the external drive attached. A complete disaster as this was our backup disc.

We urgently need to know how this could happen. Is Sugar not able to send 2000 mails with attachment?

A recap with our Sugar partner yielded the need of more memory to be allocated to PHP although the performance adjustments we followed never stated any requirements alike.

How can a mailing of say 1,1 GB (2200x0,5MB) create a data volume of over 15GB in some minutes???

And most important, how can we secure us against this event ever happening again?

Here the Server specifications:

SugarCRM OS version 4.5.1d

Ubuntu 7.10 Server
MySQL 5.0.45
PHP 5.2.3
Apache 2.2.4

Fetchmail 6.3.8
Dovecot 1.0.5
Postfix 2.4.5

I would highly appreciate the comment of a senior expert from the Sugar team.

Regards,

Hauke