Improving Disk I/O with Smartermail 15

Question asked by Gerardo Sobarzo - 5/26/2016 at 10:57 AM

Unanswered

I wonder if these tips are still valid.

Disable Windows Indexing as this reduces overall disk i/o and extends SSD life
Make sure write caching is enabled
Disable defrag for your spool, especially if you're using a SSD
Defrag RAID arrays at least every couple of days, but do it off hours if possible
Do NOT use a realtime defragger - only use the one within Windows itself
Don't defrag while backing up your mail server

Best regards.

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Tim Uzzanti Replied

5/26/2016 at 11:23 AM

Employee Post

Those are great suggestions.

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Gerardo Sobarzo Replied

5/26/2016 at 11:34 AM

Thanks Tim,

If I write caching enabled . I can have problems with the information? In what circumstances and that could happen?

Webio Replied

5/26/2016 at 1:29 PM

IMHO big improvement should be mailbox indexing dependent of webmail usage. I've mentioned it once or twice:

http://portal.smartertools.com/community/a86319/feature-request-indexing-based-on-webmail-usage-perform-first-indexing-when-user.aspx

Tim Uzzanti Replied

5/30/2016 at 6:10 PM

Employee Post

Webio,

The internal indexing is used for much more than that webmail. We reference our indexing for fast lookups on spam checks, senders, statistics, and so much more. Its not just for people using webmail. Apologize for not seeing that other topic.

Tim

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Tim Uzzanti Replied

5/30/2016 at 6:15 PM

Employee Post

Write caching helps your disk performance significantly because it batches smaller writes into a bigger block.

Your risk is when you have to hard reset a computer while it hasn’t been written to disk.

Raid controllers have their own batteries and manage much of this after reboots etc.

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Webio Replied

5/31/2016 at 4:48 AM

So disabling indexing service from SmarterMail admin interface will cause to statistics not being updated?

Tim Uzzanti Replied

5/31/2016 at 7:57 AM

Employee Post

Yes, there are some stats that will take much longer... as well as other areas of the application that will be impacted. Its an INDEX... an area we can reference mail information without going through thousands of messages and their headers in a persons mailbox. For example, when you do an EAS search from a mobile device (which uses a server query not a local query)... how do you think we get that information? If there is no index we go through all the emails. You will destroy the performance of your server if you disable mailbox indexing! Indexing is tuned for extremely large servers and is one of the reasons we can have so many domains and users on a machine. Hope this helps.

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Webio Replied

6/1/2016 at 1:28 AM

Ok. It helps. This should be mentioned somewhere in documentation and probably also responded under my feature request instead of taking this under consideration.

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