Best practice: Maximum number of Journal Tasks per EV Server

how many exchange journaling servers are you going to have? unless it's 50 with one journal mailbox on each exchange server then i dont see why you would need SO many tasks.

it really sounds like you would benefit from professional services to assess and correctly size EV for your new journaling requirements. we have the experience and special tools for estimating and calculating exactly what you're asking. please feel free to contact me if that's something you think you might be interested in.

I've seen an environment the following:

120 journal mailboxes, spread over 2 (soon to be 4) exchange servers

4 journal archiving ev servers.

about 10 tasks per server, each having about 3 to 8 (spread the load sort of) target mailboxes.

average amount of mail per day being archived 900.000 to 1.000.000 (yes per day).

during the week the number of items in the journalmailbox goes up to something like 25000, but after the weekend, the number of items is below 100.

I see. Exchange comes into the game as well.

Currently we have 3 Exchange 2010 mailbox servers in place and only one EV journal server. All journal mailboxes are hosted in separate Exchange databases for Journaling (other database limits applied than for personal mailboxes). Currently we have two Exchange journal databases to host these fifty journal mailboxes.

A reduction of Journal Tasks (Vault Stores, Journal mailboxes) in our current setup is not possible since we have to segregate the journal data...

I also could detect that each journal task is using around 130 MB of virtual memory. If I multiply this with the amount of journal tasks I would need around 8 GB of virtual memory. Back to physical memory (virtual memory should be 1.5 times of physical memory) I would need around 5 GB RAM only for the journal tasks to start. Since I only have a Windows 2003 server I would need to install two additional servers within the EV Journal site to handle all fifty journal tasks to be on the save side.

Another option I see...
What about going forward and upgrade Windows to Windows 2008 (64-bit)? The EV version 9.0.2 is not supporting 64-bit mode. Does it make sence to upgrade windows to use the upper memory for windows processes?

We run EV on W2008x64. with 32Gb ram.

however, what you will see is that the journal tasks 'take turn' when processing. You can tweak with number of connections, and items to archive, but if you have 50 journal mailboxes, I would suggest to setup an additional ev journal archiving server, and spread the load. On the other hand, it also depends on the amount of mails coming into the journalmailboxes.

is that 10.000's, 100.000's or 1.000.000's?

if 'low' (in my view lower than 1.000.000), it might be that EV catches up during the night, all depending on your backup schedule ofcourse.

I checked 1 server, and it runs 13 JournalTask.exe *32 processes, each having around 100MB memory, but CPU-usage is switching from 0 to 12%. Do you monitor your journalmailboxes for number of items? If that remains on acceptable level, I'd monitor to see if the system can keep up.