High I/O on mailserver produced by BES

Hi there,

during BES evaluation we recognized a much higher I/O on our mailserver compared to the existing system based on OneBridge. We are using Domino 7.0.3 with BES 4.1.4MR1. Has somebody made similar experience? This could become a probleme connecting several tons of users on this mailserver with Blackberry.


Thanks for your response...

Do you get a lot of SPAM?

nope, our spamfilter prevents spam from being delivered to the users mailfile

The difference in IO is not noticeable on our Exchange server. I don't know why a BES hook would affect disk IO.

I suggest putting a packet sniffer on your switch to see how much traffic is going between the two.

On the Exchange side of things 1 single BB user hooked up through the BES will cause roughly the equivelent I/O on the Exchanger server as 3 normal Exchange users.

For example: 10 BB users, 100 total Exchange users = roughly 120-130 equivalent exchange users.

I don't know for sure if this is the same on the Domino side of things, but I think it is.

Originally Posted by chucky_b

On the Exchange side of things 1 single BB user hooked up through the BES will cause roughly the equivelent I/O on the Exchanger server as 3 normal Exchange users.

For example: 10 BB users, 100 total Exchange users = roughly 120-130 equivalent exchange users.

I don't know for sure if this is the same on the Domino side of things, but I think it is.

your pretty much 100% correct on that

it has a lot to do with the blackberry push technology

in order for it to push updates as fast as they hit the server the BES actively polls your exchange box quite frequently, you can change it with some registry hacks but i dont suggest cause it will slow down your BES synchronization cycles and delay mail/other items getting to devices

thanks to all of you !!!:)

Originally Posted by mc07gti

your pretty much 100% correct on that

it has a lot to do with the blackberry push technology

in order for it to push updates as fast as they hit the server the BES actively polls your exchange box quite frequently, you can change it with some registry hacks but i dont suggest cause it will slow down your BES synchronization cycles and delay mail/other items getting to devices

Actually, it doesn't actively poll the Exchange mailbox. **NOTE: This is only for Exchange.** The BES has an "active advise" session with the user's mailboxes (just like Outlook does). A new mail arrives, and Exchange notifies all MAPI Clients for that mailbox (BES and/or Outlook) that there is a new message. It does this by an UDP packet over the MAPI connection. The MAPI client then goes back to the mailbox and picks up the message.

This is actually why in a lot of cases, BES users will get mail on their BB first before it hits Outlook, because the BES is able to pick it up faster than Outlook due to a lower ping time (the two servers are generally in the same server rack).