SnTT: INI Parameter to speed up outbound Mail Routing
Thursday 4th January, 2007I was working on a request for a customer and came across a technote that I wanted to share with everyone. The request from the customer was something like this:
"We upgraded the hardware on our outbound SMTP Domino Server last night. The hardware is 3 times as fast as the old box but Domino doesn't appear to be routing email out to internet any faster. This box's only job is to route mail to the internet, when you look at the console I want to think I'm watching the Matrix (as in the movie The Matrix)."
Well, the server was routing pretty fast, but you could still recognize the messages on the console as they went by. However, what would happen is about every minute the console would start to scroll very slow and then pause for about 10 seconds and then continue routing. After doing some research we noticed the router task kept showing the message "dispatching messages" followed by some number between 200 and 800 on average and none of the other specified 80 transfer threads appeared to be doing any work.
We came across technote 1222343 which appeared to describe our problem. Since we had multiple mail.boxes on this server, we tried implementing the MailDispatchThreshold= and setting it to 10. Why 10, well when we did a "tell router show" we always have some mail that can't be delivered to some specified domains. Most of these domains only have about 2 to 6 emails pending except for domains like yahoo.com, aol.com and gmail.com (the freebies) where we will see any where from 500 to 10,000 emails pending to these domains. (Did I mention the customer sends a lot of email)
After implementing the parameter, the console does appear to scroll faster. What we now see is a pause about every 2 to 3 minutes and a with pause of only 5 to 10 seconds and then the console scrolls "like the Matrix".
If you notice when looking at the router task that it always shows dispatching messages and the number of router threads don't appear to used up or your Domino console appears to slow down or pause periodically when you have a lot of email sitting in you mail.box or destined for a single domain, you may want to test this ini parameter and see if it will help improve your speed and routing to the internet.
Other technotes to read over
How many messages will the router dispatch before transferring
How to read the output of TELL ROUTER SHOW command
Domino R5 Router Restrictions and Controls Explained
How the Router allocates threads on a Domino server
Determining the Number Of Mailboxes Required For a Server
What is the algorithm used by the Router to route messages that failed to route initially?
"We upgraded the hardware on our outbound SMTP Domino Server last night. The hardware is 3 times as fast as the old box but Domino doesn't appear to be routing email out to internet any faster. This box's only job is to route mail to the internet, when you look at the console I want to think I'm watching the Matrix (as in the movie The Matrix)."
Well, the server was routing pretty fast, but you could still recognize the messages on the console as they went by. However, what would happen is about every minute the console would start to scroll very slow and then pause for about 10 seconds and then continue routing. After doing some research we noticed the router task kept showing the message "dispatching messages" followed by some number between 200 and 800 on average and none of the other specified 80 transfer threads appeared to be doing any work.
We came across technote 1222343 which appeared to describe our problem. Since we had multiple mail.boxes on this server, we tried implementing the MailDispatchThreshold= and setting it to 10. Why 10, well when we did a "tell router show" we always have some mail that can't be delivered to some specified domains. Most of these domains only have about 2 to 6 emails pending except for domains like yahoo.com, aol.com and gmail.com (the freebies) where we will see any where from 500 to 10,000 emails pending to these domains. (Did I mention the customer sends a lot of email)
After implementing the parameter, the console does appear to scroll faster. What we now see is a pause about every 2 to 3 minutes and a with pause of only 5 to 10 seconds and then the console scrolls "like the Matrix".
If you notice when looking at the router task that it always shows dispatching messages and the number of router threads don't appear to used up or your Domino console appears to slow down or pause periodically when you have a lot of email sitting in you mail.box or destined for a single domain, you may want to test this ini parameter and see if it will help improve your speed and routing to the internet.
Other technotes to read over
How many messages will the router dispatch before transferring
How to read the output of TELL ROUTER SHOW command
Domino R5 Router Restrictions and Controls Explained
How the Router allocates threads on a Domino server
Determining the Number Of Mailboxes Required For a Server
What is the algorithm used by the Router to route messages that failed to route initially?
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