The performance of GoldMine can fluctuate wildly. There are many areas that can be tweaked to get maximum performance.

One of the first things to understand when you undertake to tune up your GoldMine is that the GoldMine interface you see every day is a carefully orchestrated presentation of data from over thirty database files/tables. As you navigate around the program, the main GoldMine program calls upon other programs, .DLL files, Internet Explorer (and Windows itself) to deliver a cohesive environment to you.

Serious performance problems can occur when anti virus programs become overly curious about some of the components GoldMine uses.

Some of the worst anti virus-related GoldMine performance bottlenecks I’ve seen occur when files like Mailbox.DBT (where e-mail bodies are stored) or the .TBI files (the GoldMine Task bar settings/shortcuts for each user) are scanned. The fact that your normal use of GoldMine might cause these files to be accessed hundreds (if not thousands!) of times a day can really serve to underscore the problem.

If you’re in a multi-user installation of GoldMine, you probably access GoldMine’s files from a server across your network. Norton/Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition is one of the worst performance inhibitors in such a configuration. A default option in its real time scanner is to scan files accessed across the network. It may sound like a good idea — until you consider that a small-to medium company’s Mailbox.DBT file could easily be over a gigabyte in size. Every time any user retrieves/sends/deletes/files an e-mail, the Mailbox.DBT file is scanned… across the network… AGAIN. In some installations, this can mean a five minute freeze-up of the GoldMine interface while it waits. This freeze is often interpreted by users as a GoldMine problem and they may end end-task on GoldMine. This can make matters even worse, resulting in index corruption or, worse yet, data corruption.

The solution to this particular issue is to turn off the scanning of network files in the real time scanner options in your anti virus software. Obviously, you would want to make sure that your server is scanning it’s own files in real-time — otherwise you could be exposing yourself to more serious issues than performance.

I’ve seen a number of popular anti virus programs cause problems for the creation of one-button sync installation files and large synchronization transfer sets. Both procedures use the \sync\ sub-folder to store temporary files. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had to add exceptions to the entire folders (usually \sync\12341234\username\ where the number is your serial number and the name is the remote user’s name) where these temporary files are being created in order to allow the synchronization process to complete without an error.

Don’t get me wrong, anti virus software is good. It’s absolutely necessary and I do not advocate disabling it (or, worse yet, uninstalling it, as I have seen some admins do on their servers!) What I DO suggest is that good judgment be exercised when choosing your anti virus software and that you review the default settings carefully before allowing it to ruin your plans and cost your organization money that could probably be put to much better use than troubleshooting performance problems

Castell Computers recommends AVG Antivirus!