James I guess it depends on your situation as well as best practices. I've noticed no particular performance degredation with people having 10000+ messages in their inbox, or another folder [a l� my Exchange List Archive folder...] when they are running on a fast (LAN/10Mbit+) link.
Users connecting via slow links (<=128Kbit) wait for large folders to appear in Outlook, and it can be unfeasible for them to stack too many messages into one folder. Obviously, attachments are a problem in this situation. Same rule but with lower numbers goes for items in the normal file system when viewed over slow links. Presumably if I got enough users on the end of a 10 or 100Mbit link to the server the performance would degrade if they all have mailboxes with large numbers of items or regularly move big attachments to and from the server. I keep attachments out of individuals mailboxes if possible because with our policies they a) they are not available to others and b) we would hit the 16Gb limit on the mail store in Ex2K std. version PDQ. One reason for us setting a low(ish) limit on mailbox sizes to to encourage people to shift mails into public places, or act upon them and file them for reference. Some of our other sites use the public folder store as a file system with no significant performance degradation outside the increased traffic to and from the server, and the obvious requirement for an Enterprise edition of Exchange and increased disk space. Our servers are pretty capable for the users we have - if you were running a PII 233 with 256Mb of RAM it would obviously croak under any kind of load and you'd have to set some more facist policies. An OWA front end server seems to read the messages on a per-page basis from the back end server which that user is hosted on. Thus if your front server is separated from the back end by a slow link, the performance hit with folders which have large numbers of messages does not appear as great to be as great as when using the full Outlook client over a slow link. All the best, Andy Creuna Danmark A/S Snaregade 10 1205 K�benhavn K Denmark Tel : +45 22 68 58 23 Fax : +45 70 20 72 42 > -----Original Message----- > From: James Liddil [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: 9. juli 2002 14:10 > To: Exchange Discussions > Subject: One Folder (was Unlimited Quotas) > > > OK now that that has been beaten to death, I now want to try > and understand the aspects that effect performance (or > perceived performance) for users. So the policy will be set > at a certain large number for storage. Now will exchange run > better if users use folders or does it not matter and I > should just let them use the inbox for everything? And along > those same lines is keeping all their attachments in exchange > a bad thing from a performance standpoint. Again I only want > to consider this from the view point of performance and what > is "best" to keep exchange running well. If using only an > inbox has a negative impact then and only then is it > justified to spend money for training on the use of folders. > Never mind making folks more productive (the one box vs. a > well organized file cabinet). > > Jim Liddil > > _________________________________________________________________ > List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm > Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp > To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
