PST Import - 96 hours?!?

[plochner]

We are starting to evaluate Zimbra Open Source as an archival system for Exchange.

I'll take a user's mailbox and generate a PST file that contains every message in every folder that's over a 1MB and it's more than a year old. For one of our power users, it generated a 4GB PST file.

I made the registry changes to remove the 10MB attachment limit. I started the import and waited, and waited. And waited over Thanksgiving holiday.

96 hours to import a single 4.5GB PST using the import tool! Plus, I didn't set the error threshold registry tweak, so now I have to do it again (it got to about 95% complete).

Does this sound reasonable? I'm running the import wizard on basically a virgin XP installation (it has Outlook 2003 of course) on a fast 2.4ghz Core2Duo w/4GB of memory. The Zimbra server itself isn't a speed demon but it's a 1.6ghz G5 w/2GB of memory.

Any ideas on what the slowdown could be?

[rkerr]

Using 4.5.9 NE. PST import is very slow as well for any size pst over about 200MB. The process starts quickly but then seems to stall. It appears to be blocking on something, as network bandwidth is fine, memory and CPU are fine both on server and client. What can be done to improve performance?

[jholder]

Have you tried the 4.5.10 import wizard to see if it still has an issue?

[rkerr]

Any way to get the utility without downloading the entire upgrade package?

Also, What I am asking is independent of any possible bugs. Is there any server side setting that could improve performance? Eg. putting account in maintenance mode, turning off indexing or some sort of command line voodoo on an account by account basis?

[mmorse]

If you are a NE customer http:// support.zimbra.com/supportlogin.php and they can easily provide it. (or someone might post a link for you)
I thought of the indexing time as well, I suppose you could turn it off sys wide and index later...but it still doesn't equate to 96hrs of difference. Network connection is?

[plochner]

I'm eager to learn more. We have about 50 accounts with giant exchange mailboxes that we'd like to use Zimbra as an archiving solution for, but 96 hours per mailbox for a single import will make the migration cumbersome at best.

I am not a NE customer so I don't have access to the latest tool to download.

[plochner]

I've had some success with my importing. Reduced that 96 hour import down to a mere 2200 seconds according to the log files!

What I did:

Made sure both the zimbra server and this computer were on the same subnet. I don't think this would make a big difference, but it was a variable to consider.

In Zimbra Admin, disabled: SNMP, Logging, Spell Check, LDAP, and MTA. Only Mailbox was enabled.

So far so good. I'm double checking the validity of the import now.

[rickvv]

Plochner-
Try doing 'scanpst' on this large PST file before you attempt the import?
Did you compact this PST, from within Outlook?
I had a 3GB PST, that had several errors. Three attempts, three failures.
Compacted, then scanpst. Next import took much less time, and went smoothly.

I am not a zimbra guru.