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all I do is sending out bunch of emails and my server's load gets up to 900s, any ideas where to look?

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How about some more detail? What load gets up to 900s? – joeqwerty Sep 30 '09 at 21:15
i use latest RHEL5 w/ latest updates and on VM nothing but sendmail – alexus Sep 30 '09 at 22:00
what software are you using to actually initiate sending messages (sendmail is your MTA, but normally you've got a script/application handling your mailing). When you start a mailing - try running 'top' and looking for the processes in 'D' or 'R' - these are the processes actually driving the load, and may give us an idea what's actually going on. (Also, how fast are you sending messages?) – epic9x Oct 1 '09 at 12:00
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Load more detail needed before anyone can give you a proper answer.

What do you see in top when load average is that high? Along the top line of top's output, what do the CPU stats look like? A large amount of %us, or %wa?

How many e-mails are 'a bunch'? Are they ones produced in a batch through some automated means? What mail server software are you using on the server?

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It would help if you posted you Xen configuration file, however my immediate guess is that the dom-u was given insufficient memory. Is this HVM or paravirt? Please provide some more information.

Loads like that usually mean I/O bound processes ... so some details about your network configuration (bridge / NAT) on dom-0 would also help.

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