You are experiencing performance problems with your MessageMaster SQL database, and you want to see what you can do to improve the situation. Or, you just want to make sure that your MessageMaster SQL database is optimized and that it will continue to run efficiently.
Performance tuning of your Windows server and SQL Server is beyond the scope of Objective Software's documentation. This article is provided as a guideline only, and is not a substitute for a SQL DBA.
The most common cause of SQL Server performance issues is not enough physical memory in the machine, causing excessive swapping. Add memory to the machine. Also be aware that SQL 2000 will take as much memory as it can. If you add memory, SQL will expand to fill the new memory, and your server may still experience poor performance when running other tasks. If this is happening to you, you can use the SQL Server Enterprise Manager console to control the maximum amount of memory that SQL Server process will use.
Consider the total number of messages in your ObjSoft database. If you're adding 20,000 messages a day, your database can grow large. Purge old messages on a regular basis. See "Purging Messages from the MessageMaster database", referenced below.
Consider the placement of high-access files, like the Windows pagefile, the ObjSoft database, the ObjSoft database logs, the ObjSoft database full-text catalog, and the MessageMaster IncomingMessages Queue directory. If too many of these are on the same disk, performance will be slow due to thrashing. See "What is the recommended hardware for MessageMaster server?", referenced below, for more information on hardware configuration and requirements for MessageMaster.
Another common cause is index performance. MessageMaster sets up a full-text catalog on the Messages table, plus there is are regular indexes on the Messages table. Both the database and the indexes can become fragmented and inefficient. A maintenance plan should be set up to optimize the indexes and redistribute free space in the database. See "Create a SQL Server Maintenance Plan", referenced below.
It can be useful to use Task Manager to view the amount of virtual memory that SQL Server and other processes on your machine are using. You can see this by adding the Virtual Memory Size column to Task Manager.
Finally, consider the possibility that MessageMaster is simply installed on machine that is not powerful enough to keep up with the volume of messages being generated in your environment. If you decide you need to move MessageMaster to another machine, see "Moving MessageMaster from one Server to Another", referenced below.