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32 Understanding system requirements
Factors that affect performance
Factors that affect performance
Hardware components that affect performance
The performance of Symantec Mail Security for SMTP can be affected by many
factors. This section provides guidelines regarding those factors, and
suggestions that may improve performance.
Overall performance involves several factors, some depending on the
configuration and deployment options you choose, and others depending on
external factors, such as the percentage of your organization's email that is
spam.
The components that make up the system affect its performance. Increase
performance by increasing the physical make-up of your system. If you run the
Control Center and Scanner on different computers, consider the following
recommendations:
Processing power – Scanners need less disk storage, but powerful CPUs and
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memory; especially if virus scanning is enabled.
Disk space – The Control Center likely needs much more disk space
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(depending on the volume of logging, reporting, and quarantined messages
retained). It should also have a much higher sustained I/O throughput
capacity than what is specified for Scanners.
Consider the following recommendations for computers running Symantec
software:
Network – Consider using switched 100 Mb/s fast Ethernet or gigabit
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network connections between the Control Center and each Scanner.
CPU (speed and type) – increase the number and speed of CPUs per server.
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We recommend dual Intel Xeon processors if your email traffic rate warrants
it.
RAM (speed and type) – Track memory usage and increase RAM as
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necessary to minimize or avoid disk swapping. Tomcat can use as much as
600 MB of RAM when completing certain tasks. MySQL can also use a large
amount of RAM.
Disk Type and I/O speeds – Improve MySQL database performance by using
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a fast RAID and/or attached disk array. MySQL is used by the Control Center.
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