Scheduled archiving run behaviour
So when you have a scheduled archiving run it does the following
1. Places a message in the A5 Queue telling it to process an exchange server
2. The Archive Task then looks up all the provisioned an enabled users, and posts a single message for each user in to the A5 queue, so if you have 2000 enabled users, you have 2000 MSMQ messages
3. The Archiving task then picks up each message/user in the order they were posted, and processes five at a time by default (This is based on the Connections specified in the Archiving task)
4. It then scans each mailbox looking for eligible items, and then puts each item in an order, based on size and age etc
5. Archive Task then archives the first 1000 items in that list, and then moves on to the next mailbox, this is based on the Messages Per Pass defined in the Archiving Task
6. Once the Task has finished processing each mailbox, it then looks to see if any of the mailboxes had more items to archive past the 1000 items..... if there are any, then it posts those mailboxes back in to the A5 queue
So if you have say 2000 users, it goes through and does 1000 messages for each of the mailbox if time permits, if you then have say 50 users that have more than 1000 messages to archive, then it posts the 50 users back in to the A5 at the end of its first processing run
If the Archive Task doesn't have enough time to complete, it will simply leave the users in the A5 queue ready to pick up on the next archiving run
If you have say a 10 hour schedule and it finishes archiving the mailboxes in one hour, it will not continuously look in the mailboxes, you will just have 9 extra hours where the archiving task is idle, because it has archived all eligible messages
If the archive task detected any moved items/moved shortcuts, then those items are posted in to the A6 queue, telling it to update the location in the database, and then go and modify the shortcut to update it with the new location, this will run at any time the task is running, it does not adhere to the site schedule or the task schedule
If you use an After Backup scenario, and items are left pending, and then you do a Backup, it will then update those items to be a pending item, and turn in to a full shortcut, this will happen at any time during the day as long as the task is running and EV is not in backup mode.
