EVConverterSandbox.exe - 25 instances, 100% utilization

[NaturesRevenge]

EV v9.02 ~8,500 Vaults on a single EV server
Exchange 2007 SP3 RU2

I have a support ticket opened with Symantec, but in the meantime, I'd love to get any opinions or recommendations from this forum.

The EV server listed above is an HP DL380G7, 16 procs, 48GB memory, SAN attached. Anywhere from 10-25 instances of EVConverterSandbox.exe are simultaneously running, and it's practically melting the server. Accessing Archive Explorer using OWA, it can take a minute to expand Vault folders and 45-60 seconds to open a single message from the Vault.

I understand that this executable converts content to HTML, but the archiving task is not set to run during the day. And to help with troubleshooting, we've temporarily stopped the PST locator, collector and migrator tasks. Potential culrpits are: journaling content (the journaling occurs on a separate EV server but no instances of this executable are running on this server, making me suspect that the primary EV server with 100% utilization is also indexing Journaling content) or users are moving PST content to their Virtual Vault and then synchronizing.

Thanks in advance for any wisdom!

A J

[TonySterling]

So where is your journal archives stored?  Sounds like you may just have one server doing storage and indexing which wouldn't be optimal.

How many Vault Stores do you have and where are their partitions?

If you look at MSMQ what queues have items in them?

[NaturesRevenge]

Hi Tony:

Mailbox archives and Journal archive are all stored on an EMC Centera - writes to one Centera and then replicates to a 2nd Centera in another data center.

We have two Vault stores - one for mailboxes / PSTs and one for journaling. Partitions are on Centera storage.

The primary EV server (mailbox and pst archiving) has the indexing and storage service installed. The journaling EV server also has the indexing and storage service installed. It appears that the journaling server is in fact doing its own indexing and conversion, using EVConverterSandbox.exe.

MSMQ has multiple EV private queues but none of them ever seem to have more messages than zero.

Important: Symantec support asked us to verify SQL maintenance was occuring on all EV databases. Our internal DBA confirmed just now that regular degragmenting was NOT happening (last full defrag was February, 2011 - ugh). He is setting up and starting defragmentation jobs to run tonight. I'm hoping this is part of the problem and also the resolution.

Thanks again for your comments.

[JesusWept3]

Make sure you install the latest hotfix for the converters that has a slight performance update

[NaturesRevenge · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the responses. Symantec support directed me toward a couple of tech articles that dealt with attachment conversion timeout values and whether to convert to HTML by default or to TEXT. The default for XLS file attachments is it convert to TEXT but we had it set to HTML (reason = unknown). I made the registry changes and cycled the EV services. Now, there are only 5-8 instances of EVConverterSandbox.exe and processor utilization hovers between 20-40%, even under full client load.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH146281

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=DOC2848

Happy, AJ