Can I do anything to increase the speed of the scans?

Question / Problem

Can I do anything to increase the speed of the scans?

Answer / Solution

In order to increase the scan performance of SpaceObServer, please consider the following:

1. Do not use the 'SpaceObServer Embedded' database for data storage. A SQL Server like MS SQL Server, My SQL or ORACLE provides a much better performance for scanning and exporting data in combination with SpaceObServer.

2. Use a well performing database server, with an up-to-date CPU. The database is the bottleneck of the scan performance. 70-80% of the scan performance and the workload is hold by the database. Please check if the machine on that the database server is running has a high CPU load. If so, consider transferring it to a different machine. Furthermore, a database server will greatly benefit from additional free RAM, so extending the RAM usually increases the performance of the database server

3. If you are scanning network shares, another reason for a slow scan can be a slow network connection to the target machine. Local scans run faster than network scans. So if it is possible we recommend installing SpaceObServer directly on the file server and accessing the scanned information with SpaceObServer Remote Clients or the SpaceObserver WebAccess. If you however prefer network scans, we do not recommend to scan more than 3-5 machines with one instance of SpaceObServer, but this depends totally on the number of files and folders on the servers as well as it depends on the update rate of the files and folders on the servers.

4. The option 'Track NTFS Alternate Data Streams and NTFS Hard Links' will also decrease the scan speed, if activated. This option can be toggled in the  'Configure Scans' dialog. Errors during the scan (database timeouts, missing access permissions etc.) can also cause slow scans. All errors are logged in your Windows Event Log (Category 'Application') under the source 'SpaceObServer Service' and can be viewed there.

5. 'The more entries in the database tables, the slower the scans'. This is why multiple scans are split to multiple database tables.
In addition, you could split the server scans to multiple scans of UNC shares ('\\Server1\share1\'; '\\Server1\share2\'; ). This would result in smaller tables and faster scans.

(6. The index structure of the SpaceObServer database is optimized to do both, execute scans and access the information from the user interface. By customizing the indices of SpaceObServer you may optimize the performance. We do not recommend doing this, since if you manipulate the existing index structure this could have huge consequences for the performance of the scans and the user interface.)