Knowledgebase

Answer / Solution

To increase the scan performance of SpaceObServer, please consider the following:

1. Use a well-performing database server, with an up-to-date CPU. Most commonly the database is the bottleneck of the scan performance. 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. See also our recommendations for the database infrastructure.

2. 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 Client Access or the SpaceObServer WebAccess. However, if you prefer network scans, we do not recommend scanning 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 depending on the update rate of the files and folders on the servers.

3. The scan options "Calculate Permissions (ACLs) and store in database" and "Track NTFS Alternate Data Streams and NTFS Hard Links" will also decrease the scan speed, if activated. These options can be toggled in the Configure Scans dialog.

4. By default, the Scan Service options are configured to ensure good performance for typical scenarios. However, in specific cases these settings can be adjusted within the Options dialog. For instance, when performing network scans involving high latency, it is beneficial to increase both the maximum number of threads and the process priority. Conversely, in situations involving very heavy database load, you should consider reducing the number of concurrent scans.

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 larger scans (>10 mio files) into multiple scans of sub directory trees ("\\Server1\share1\", "\\Server1\share2\", ...). This would result in smaller tables and faster scans.

6. Errors during the scan (database timeouts, missing access permissions etc.) can also cause slow scans. Such errors are logged in your Windows Event Log (Category "Application") of the source "SpaceObServer Agent" and can be viewed there.