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Knowledge BaseIncrease Performance of Microsoft SMTP Server
Some tips to speed up your SMTP server for use with ActivMail
The easiest way to increase throughput from ActivMail to your Microsoft SMTP server is by creating virtual servers.
Follow these steps to add a virtual SMTP server.
Add another IP address to your server (its a good idea to put your SMTP server behind a firewall, and on it's own subnet. This way you can queue mail to the SMTP server at a very high network speed, and it is more secure.)
Create a new directory on your hard drive, it is a good idea to create the directory on alternate disks, using RAID is a good idea, disk access is one of the main bottle necks in sending email, SMTP Servers queue all mail to disk before trying to send it. When your sending thousands of messages you have to create and delete thousands of messages. One very fast solution is to use a RAM disk, but keep in mind that RAM is not persistent so if your server crashes, you will loose any messages that were in the queue.
Open the Internet Services Manager, and right click to add a new Virtual SMTP server.
Go through the wizard, and be sure to select your new IP address, and your new folder.
Add the server IP address to your list of servers in the SERVER attribute of the ActivMail tag.
Keep repeating as long your performance is still increasing, the performance curve should increase steeply, peak, and then drop off. Use the Performance Viewer to monitor disk access, CPU usage, memory access, and also SMTP server statistics (messages per second, etc).
If you aren't running your SMTP server on its own network, and only have one IP address, its still a good idea to create multiple virtual servers with different spool directories. Having multiple queue directories greatly improves performance. Also having multiple threads running in ActivMail improves throughput quite a bit, take a look at your network usage while ActivMail is only running one thread (one server in the Server attribute), its hardly being used to its potential.
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