In the performance guide it list a 2.8 ghz Xeon Single Processor can archive 15000 messages per hour, Duo can process 25000 and a Quad or 2 Duo procs can archive 400000 messages.
So does anyone know what affect processor speed has on the archiving rate? So if I have a Xeon processor at 3.16ghz, will my archive rate be significantly better? Thanks.
The number of processors (or cores) has much more effect on archiving rate than processor speed, as you can see for yourself from the examples you list (and btw, it's 40000/hour, not 400000 ).
So if you're asking whether a 3.16 Ghz Xeon will significantly outperform a 2.8 Ghz Xeon, then the answer is no.
I've found Enterprise Vault to be one of the most resource intensive applications I've ever run across. While our average message size is about double that used in the performance guide, we are only seeing 6-7k messages per hour during mailbox archiving. All 4 CPUs are running 100% all night long, just indexing and storing messages. The actual archiving tasks are running on a separate server. We are replacing the 4x CPU box to a 4x dual-core server with 8GB of RAM in late February to try and improve archiving performance and end-user reponsiveness during the archiving window.
I'd suggest overengineering your solution because changing the architecture after the fact can be quite difficult.
There are eight StorageArchive.exe threads running that use 90%+ of the CPUs combined. IndexServer.exe and StorageCrawler.exe use just a few percent each.
Average message size from mailbox archiving is just under 80k while it is only 43k in the journal archive. My best guess as to the larger message size from mailbox archiving is that users are more likely to archive/retain large messages with attachments.
Still seems rather high. Check you temp directory in case there are a large number of files there. It may not be related, but I've seen large number of files there causing the converters to take up more CPU than they normally would.
You did say StorageArchive though, not EVConvertorSandbox...
There were 2,000 +/- ExchangePerflog temp files which I deleted, but that didn't seem to make any difference.
The /3gb switch is long gone from boot.ini. I think the deployment scanner checks for that now.
I've also excluded the EV drives from AD, moved all the index, queue and temp files to fast disk, removed all unnecessary utilities... but performance hasn't changed considerably.