For the past few days the CPU usage on the mail server has been at around 40% accross all four processors. Tonight I removed 3 zombie (dead) pop3 processes and have returned the server to it normal 2 to 3 percent average usage. Users of the webmail should notice some improvements. POP3 responses should also improve.
This looks a lot better
01:20:03 up 277 days, 13:12, 3 users, load average: 0.28, 0.79, 2.11
200 processes: 196 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 3 stopped
CPU0 states: 0.0% user 0.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 100.0% idle
CPU1 states: 5.1% user 0.2% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 94.1% idle
CPU2 states: 0.0% user 0.1% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 99.4% idle
CPU3 states: 3.4% user 2.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 93.4% idle
Mem: 1547368k av, 1494040k used, 53328k free, 0k shrd, 151496k buff
1067124k actv, 7204k in_d, 30324k in_c
Swap: 2048276k av, 6760k used, 2041516k free 1085192k cached