Effect of temporarily disabling moved shortcut processing

[Mark_Tkachyk]

Our Exchange archiving policy (EV 9.0.2) has the options set to "delete orphaned shortcuts", "update archive location for items moved in the mailbox" and "update retention category for moved items".   We want to archive as fast as possible over the next few months.   These policy options have to be adding some amount of overhead, especially as the number of shortcuts in user's mailboxes increase.   If we turn them off, archiving should go a little faster.

I have 2 questions:

1.  Does anyone know if the performance impact of these options is significant?

2.  If we turn them off for the next 3 months and then turn them back on, will it "catch up" -- i.e. does it look at all the shortcuts in a user's mailbox on each archiving run?    Or does it only affect items that were recently archived?

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

When you re-enable the setting it will catch up.  Really though, how much overhead are you seeing?  I wouldn't think it would be great enough to warrant disabling.

What is your current EV server hardware config and what archiving throughput are you seeing?

Can you increase your schedule archive schedule to get more processed?  Like archive all day on Saturday and Sunday?

[Mark_Tkachyk]

Thanks Tony.   I have no idea how much overhead it creates.   Only way to tell is to turn it off.   I didn't want to turn it off without understanding how it really works.

Performance is acceptable -- about 4 GB per hour per EV server.   We have 16 EV servers, each with 12 GB RAM and 4 cpus.    We are moving to a super aggressive window -- 85+ hours per week for archiving.  Management has already committed the reuse of the storage that will be freed up on the Exchange servers after archiving so if we can find a little tweak to increase the archiving throughput by another 5% or 10% then it means a lot to management.

[Simon_B_]

It will surely remove some overhead if you temporarily turn these two features off as EV does not have to check every shortcut if it has moved or is orphaned.

In fact it is common practice to turn these off when archiving is enabled in a large environment as it will allow the ev server to use the whole schedule to archive items and thus free space on the exchange servers more quickly.

As Tony stated it will catch up if you enable it afterwarsd, even though this catching up might also take a few days/weeks depending on the environments size. The only thing that can obviously happen until the features are enabled again is that the view in archive explorer differs from the mailbox few if the user moved shortcuts in his mailbox