200x qmail process

[devoogdt]

Hi,

I've rented a VM server with plesk 8.1 installed.
For about 6 months everything went well.
Now the server is getting really slow, even that some of my services are failing.
When I look on the server, I see about 200 times this process:
"/var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd /var/qmail/bin/smtp_auth /var/qmail/bin/true /var/qmail/bin/cmd5checkpw /var/qmail/bin/true"
How can I start troubleshooting this ?
I already installed an rootkit checker, but that didn't recognize anything.

Thanks.

 

[devoogdt]

so this is the daemon that is spawned from xinet when a mailserver tries to contact my server.
It seems that somebody is spamming my server really hard.

Is it normal that these 'smtp' processes take forever to log off ?
Sometimes these processes can take up to 2 minutes.

 

[neodepo]

The same is happening to me!
Have you get any solution yet?
My datacenter support is helping by limiting qmail-smtpd instances to 30.
But I have not get any real solution yet.
Thanks