Symantec 10765539 Planning Guide - Page 32

32 Understanding system requirements Factors that affect performance Factors 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. Hardware components that affect performance 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 memory; especially if virus scanning is enabled. ■ Disk space - The Control Center likely needs much more disk space (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 network connections between the Control Center and each Scanner. ■ CPU (speed and type) - increase the number and speed of CPUs per server. We recommend dual Intel Xeon processors if your email traffic rate warrants it. ■ RAM (speed and type) - Track memory usage and increase RAM as 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 a fast RAID and/or attached disk array. MySQL is used by the Control Center.