The system is a live email server with reasonable load.
though most of it is junk mail coming in. !!!!!

its a p4 with 160 GB HDD and 1 GB RAM running redhat linux 9.0
The configuration is postfix/apache/ldap/squirrelmail/maildrop/courier/spamd/spamassassin.

PRoblem is, whenever i run rsync or updatedb the system becomes unstable. As in, if I am checking mail (webmail-->squirrelmail) it will constantly throw me off.

then once rsync stops running, for the next few min, spamd will be running in full force and loadavg (1min) goes upto 7 and stays there and then gradually drops.
there will be 3-4 spamd processes running.

The updatedb program makes the system even more unstable.

Even though its run middle of the night.

Has anyone observed this? any tips on how this can be avoided? does rsync always mess up the other resources?

thanks!!

Also, i notice that, when rsync is running, the many postfix processes that are normally running, slowly die out. this is when the loadavg starts falling. Then when it falls below a certain level, ldap is restarted. and then it ll works fine again.
I dont know the connection between all this, but this is the way i get it to work.