Why does GMS Webmail appear to slow considerably under heavy usage?

Question

Users experience slowdowns on the system when large numbers of users log on. This will be most apparent at times such as the start of shift when the majority of users will log on for the day.

There is no apparent reason for this in the logs, enabling parser logging simply shows the system pausing randomly. CPU usage may be somewhat higher than normal but will not be at 100%.

Answer

The pauses in parser logging all relate to string copies of relatively large strings, i.e. > 100 bytes. The memory allocation routines are enhanced for smaller string copies but ones of this size fall outside of these routines.

The memory handling routines have been further enhanced to also take these larger strings into account. This will have the effect of the services showing a greater memory usage at startup time, but conversely memory usage will not rise as much as previously. The overall result is that memory usage over time will be no higher than previously seen.

These enhancements have now also been made configurable so that they can be tuned for each particular installation. However, we would strongly recommend that the default settings are retained unless you are instructed to change them by Gordano’s support department. If you do increase the settings for any of these options please do so in small incremental steps from the defaults as they will have a dramatic effect on the initial memory requirements for the services.

Note: The WWW service can be configured separately from all of the other services as this service is more likely to require fine tuning than the others.

All of the settings reside under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareInternetShopperMailParameters registry key and all are of type DWORD

See Also:

• What’s new in build 3793?

Keywords:webmail memory slow usage pauses