Understanding system
requirements
This chapter includes the following topics:
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Factors that affect performance
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Ports used by Symantec Mail Security
Factors that affect performance
The performance of Symantec Mail Security appliances can be affected by many
factors. This section provides guidelines regarding those factors, and suggestions
that may improve performance.
Overall performance involves several factors, some depending on the configuration
and deployment options you choose, and others depending on external factors,
such as the percentage of your organization’s email that is spam.
Environmental factors that affect performance
Environmental factors, including historical usage patterns of your particular
deployment, will affect system performance. Prior to installation, collect
information about your environment to understand typical usage patterns:
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Outgoing SMTP connections. This can cause additional overhead by swelling
disk queues with email destined for remote email servers which may not be
immediately accepting new email. Larger queues on disk result in reduced
MTA performance. Ideally, inbound and outbound mail streams should be
configured to work on separate appliances.
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Chapter