Unity MAPI Performance Impact

[darcop]

Can anyone point me to some information as to how Unity interacts with Exchange via MAPI and what performance impact there may on the exchange server? How does the number of sessions scale vs the # of subscribers? is there an upper cap / fail safe? How does Unity monitor the message store for delivery notification on non-voice messages? If it polls, how frequently? How does a Unity session compare to an outlook session from a performance perspective? If this is covered somewhere I'd sure appreciate a link. Otherwise a few quick answers from one of the Unity gurus would be great.

Thanks,

Pete

[kechambe]

For notifications, Unity logs in to ever subscriber’s mailbox at startup using a single MAPI session. During this login Unity asks Exchange to send it notifications when specific events occur. So Exchange sends Unity notifications when new messages come in, or a message is marked as read and so on, Unity doesn't actually poll the mailbox.

Unfortunately comparing Unity to Outlook is like comparing apples to oranges. Unity only has a single MAPI session but I wouldn’t say that it has the same load on Exchange as a single Outlook client does. But then again would an Outlook client put more load on Exchange than Unity if it was sending a 35mb attachment? It depends how you classify load. That would likely require more bandwidth that Unity does but I don’t know if you would call the load higher. It really would depend how Unity was being used and how Outlook was being used. I don’t think we can say each Unity port = .5 Outlook clients because it would be different for every customer.

I know that isn’t a simple and concise answer but I hope it makes sense.

Thanks,

Keith