The MTStore can be the work of the devil

We discussed FTI's in our last blog post, here's another little FTI surprise we have come across in our travels.

Do you have Message Tracking enabled?

If you do then you should know the Mail Tracking Store database must have a Full Text Index in order for Message Tracking to work properly, the mtstore.nsf database is indexed only by the MTC task and just as we saw with the Updater in the last blog this indexing process creates extensive fragmentation over time.

Have you ever checked the size of the Full Text Index (mtstore.ft) associated with this database? Take a minute or two to check, you may be surprised.

Here's one we saw recently in on a customer server, Defrag.NSF reported it was working with the Full Text Index for the mtstore.nsf (mtstore.ft), this was reported to have 16,389 fragments!!, The size of the Index is also reported as over 2 Gig!! (595,280 clusters x 4KB = 2,381,120 KB)

To check the size of the Index, find the mtstore.nsf, right click and select properties and go to the Index tab to check the size of the index.

Also of note is recommended that for optimal performance of Mail Tracking the Index should be periodically rebuilt. (see below), the MTC task does this.

This is the kind of performance sapping fragmentation that Defrag.NSF helps prevent happening in the first place, the thing is, if you don't know where to look and what to look for you probably never realise this stuff is going on under the covers of Domino's daily operations, but it is. The difference between a server that has been left to do it's own thing year after year, and one that has been well maintained using Defrag.NSF on a schedule, is quite substantial The greatly reduced I/O (directly affected by fragmentation!) means it runs more efficiently, web pages and databases are more responsive when accessed, nsf files need to be read by your backup software and when that software can just read those files from one location on the disk, the backup times are greatly reduced. Less wear and tear on your hardware due to less thrashing while locating and reading file fragments scattered all over the disk, the list goes on.......

Try it now.

By Grant Osborne