[TreeDude]

In SP6 RIM added the ability, via the registry, to change the interval at which the BES scans mailboxes for changes. By default it is 30min. Has anyone experimented with changing this value? The release notes warn about using values too low causes performance problems. I was hoping to maybe bump it down to 10-15min but am worried about the impact it may have on our main mail server. Anyone have an incite?

You can find the info on it on page 6 of the release notes for SP6.

[jsplit]

It's going to have a performance impact but if you're only running a BES with 26 users I'd be shocked if you noticed...

[curriertech]

Woohooo I've been wanting this for a while (and I've been on SP6 for a while not realizing it was there!)

Maybe edit the title so it references read/unread rather than new mail scanning? I was confused until I read through the release notes.

[TreeDude]

Originally Posted by jsplit

It's going to have a performance impact but if you're only running a BES with 26 users I'd be shocked if you noticed...

My main concern is that we have been having performance problems on our main mail server. But that is because it is running on our AS400, which is really taxed with new programs that were put in earlier this year. So I guess my question is, which side is the performance impact mainly on, the main mail server or the BES?

[gibson_hg]

It will impact the mail server more as all the work is being done there and not on the BES itself.

RIM had that set to 15-20 minute intervals for a reason. I personally would not go lower than 10-15 minutes, especially if you have a large environment. Smaller environments can get away with it, as long as the hardware is decent.

[Aroc]

The load on the mail servers (and subsequent delays or lack thereof from the users' perspectives) from changing the rescan value may vary depending if these users have full text indexes or not. Also the sizes of the mail files (number of folders, number of messages in the Inbox view, the mail files sizes themselves) are going to factor into load numbers. As those numbers go up for active BES users (or active users period) so does the load value per user.

The load seems to be more on the mail server end than on the BES end.

Which end-user aspect are you hoping to improve by modifying the rescan interval? All FM requests? More timely reconciliation of deletes or read/unread status for messages? I'm just curious.

Sometimes it's hard to tell with out baselining your performance metrics, making the change, then get new performance measurements. The real acid test seems to be if normal users notice a performance degredation as a result of a recent change. Depending on what new programs your running on your AS/400 (Domino programs?) you may be running out of disk I/O and CPU time when the scheduled agents are running. Lots of concurrent users with large numbers of documents in their inboxes seem to gobble of RAM and CPU time. I'm a big fan of Full text indexes of mail files for BES users. For us, that helped the speed the reconcilation of deletes and read/unread status updates for the users at the cost of some disk space. Whether or not your use TL is also going to factor into the equation of estimated load.

To me, this falls into the same discussion as "should I execute Agents more frequently than every XX minutes." In variably sources like IBM and RIM are going to suggest c.30 minutes as a safe interval, and it is for many shops. AS/400 is supposed to run on some serious server iron and I do recall some of the busiest and largest numbers of concurrent Notes users are often cited to be AS/400 boxes. Like everything else, it depends on what else the server is doing. It sounds like an interesting environment you have there.

[TreeDude]

When a change is made from within the Lotus Notes client it can take some time for that change to hit the Blackberry (going the other way is near instant). That is what I am trying to speed up. I have always gotten complaints about it, but I always just said there was nothing I could do.

We do not have indexing turned on. I asked out Domino admin about it and he was unsure of what kind of performance impact the indexing would have, so he does not want to risk it. We will be doing server hardware and software upgrades next year, so when we go to 8 I will be sure he turns it on.

[CarterTan]

The polling time on a Domino BES is every 20secs when the mailbox is inactive, meaning to say when there are no new mails and 7 seconds when there are new mails.

For example, after 20secs, the BES detects a new mail, it will poll the new mails and check again after 7 secs and if 7 secs there are new mails, it will poll the message again,

Email reconciliation is performed in batches because the BES will have to check that user's state database in the Domino. The impact can be quite big if the user has a large state database or mailbox.

I will recommend not to tweak the settings. As what jsplit has said, RIM does it for a reason.

[bbnotes]

I'm assuming polling and rescan are two different things.

Polling (20 sec) - checks for new emails
Rescan (30 min) - checks for read/unread, deletion

Can anyone confirm the above?

Thanks

[noname]

Hey bbnotes, maybe you already got the answer. Yes, you are correct on these...

Polling (20 sec) - checks for new emails
Rescan (30 min) - checks for read/unread, deletions

[knottyrope]

My users are knot complaining, so they stay at default for now.

[Aroc]

Indexing doesn't place much load on the Domino server, IME. When BES is doing full rescans, that places a higher load on the Domino mail server than Indexing ever does.

Like someone else mentioned, if you have decent servers (CPU and memory) you might be able to get away with more aggressive rescan intervals. I would also make sure BES has 4GB to itself on whatever box it runs. More memory always seems to help.

[TreeDude]

We upgraded our AS400 about a month ago and I dropped the rescan time to 15min. Everything has been ok. Now I just need to convince my Domino Admin to turn on indexing.

[Aroc]

Good to know.