[arronpitman]

Hello Bes Admins!

Time for my second post... Hope it goes as well as the last one

Environment:
BES 4.1.3
Exchange 2007 SP1 RU1
latest CDO.dll and MAPI32.dll from MS


OK, it's effecting the CEO (typical)

He is one of the heaviest users and picks up on these things staright away.

Essentially he notes that reconciliation is not as instantanious as he would like. Changes can take an hour or more to reconcile in both directions. I personally do not experience this and yet I'm activated on the same BES he is.

I've searched through the RIM KB and this forum and not found any definitive answers. In fact it almost seems as though there may be none

What I'm looking for is a basic desciption of the reconciliation process, what components of BES are in use here? What logs should I be checking? What hardware / network element may have an effect on this? Just so I can work through the troubleshooting with some logical steps...

Also, some posts mentions that there are a number of factors that can effect reconciliation times. Things like the BES load balancing itself and requesting reconciliation in batches.

What are the forces at work here? What are we battling against?


Yours Faithfully

Mr Pit

[gibson_hg]

Reconciliation will only be instanious if you use the 'Reconcile Now' option on the device. Other than that it depends on the user. The BES needs for the user to have no activity on the device for 15-20 minutes or until the number of items to be reconciled reaches 100. Seeing as you said he is a heavy user then this is typical actually.

Essentially the BES scans a mailbox entirely after 15-20 minutes of no activity. Upon rescan the BES notices changes in email properties(read/moved/deleted), those changes are then made. If the Exchange server is busy then it takes longer to scan the mailbox, but in this case it sounds like the user.

As for components, the BES will never just go looking for items to reconcile. Reconciliation is primarily up to the device, when you read an email on the device it queues a property change for that email. When the BES rescans the mailbox it will apply those changes and vice versa when an email is read in Outlook.

Also, Reconciliation is a low priority process. That's why it gets pushed to the back burner and can take a while.

You cannot change anything about reconciliation anywhere. Not in the registry nor in the BES settings. Reconciliation just works, plain and simple. It can take longer some and shorter for others, it's mostly up to the user and device.

Hope this helps.

[arronpitman]

Thanks gibson_hg...

That's exactly what I was looking for

I'll take that to the CEO with gusto

(Why RIM can't put something like that on their site I'll never know)


Until next time.....

[arronpitman]

The CEO is still complaining about this one (again, typical)

When you say

"The BES needs for the user to have no activity on the device for 15-20 minutes or until the number of items to be reconciled reaches 100. Seeing as you said he is a heavy user then this is typical actually"

Do this mean that the device need to lay completely dormant with no user interaction and no mail being sent to it for 15-20 mins fora mailbox scan to occur?

And is the number of items to be reconciled, I take that to mean mails coming in / going out, calendar updates etc... am I right in thinking this?

So, as he is a heavy user, the typical behaviour you descibe would be that his device rarely has a period of inactivity. But as for the number of items reaching 100, I would have though, on a heavy user, that this would have happened quite regularly.

Can you clarify this for me please....


Thanks in advance of wise one....

[Frank Castle]

Think of it this way. The BES is doing it's thing and one of the agents is the email reconcile process. It does a scan of all mailboxes and notes the change in the message (read, deleted, filed) and updates the device and user mailbox after each scan. This occurs every 15-20 mins and is hard set in the BES registry.

A user can force the reconcile by selecting Reconcile now from the message menu which instructs the BES agent to "sync" the email changes right away between Blackberry / BES. I do this throughtout the day and also tunnel down and "Purge Deleted" to clear the deleted folder also. It usually does it's thing within 1 min on our setup. (blade dual cpu, 4gb)

[arronpitman]

OK, so we're saying regardless of handheld activity the mailbox will get scanned after 15-20mins and the changes will be reconciled to the handheld.

Why, in that case, can it take 1-3 hours for my users handheld to update?

What possibily could be casuing this?

[Frank Castle]

What is the ping between BES and Exchange? perfmon for your Exchange server / BES cpu / memory? How large are your user mailboxes?

[arronpitman]

This particular users mailbox is 1Gb in size. others are bigger (we have no upper limit).

Pinging [172.29.222.46] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 172.29.222.46: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 172.29.222.46: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 172.29.222.46: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 172.29.222.46: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128

Ping statistics for 172.29.222.46:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

Pinging with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 172.29.222.25: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128
Reply from 172.29.222.25: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 172.29.222.25: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 172.29.222.25: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128

Ping statistics for 172.29.222.25:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms

Ping reults from both BES servers shown above.

What perfmon counters should I be looking at?

[scott_perry]

Also, if you really want to troubleshoot the user's mail flow, put him in his own static mailbox agent. That way, you can easily see how long the time between rescans is for him. To do that, double-click on the user to open the properties dialog. Go to advanced and set "Enable static Mailbox Agent" to true and assign a number between 200 & 399.

After you have this set up, you can search the log for "rescan" and note the times they occur. You can also then see what is happening for the users mailbox when they say: "I read this message at 10 o'clock on my Blackberry and it didn't update in Outlook until an hour later."

You also might want to get the refid from the message by opening the message on the blackberry, then hold ALT while typing out the word 'view'. You can then search the logs for that refid.

Hope you are able to get an answer to satisfy your user, but I think you have your work cut out for you.

[gibson_hg]

Do this mean that the device need to lay completely dormant with no user interaction and no mail being sent to it for 15-20 mins fora mailbox scan to occur?

The BB can be used but if there is activity like sending/receiving email, updating the calendar/contacts. Essentially any involvement with the mailbox. If there is activity then the BES doesn't need to scan the mailbox. But if there is no mailbox activity then 15-20 minutes later the BES will rescan the mailbox to ensure that it hasn't missed anything.

The BES does not rescan all the mailboxes every 15-20 minutes regardless. This just won't work in a lot of environments. Some BES just have to many users to scan in that amount of time and it will tax the BES heavily.

And is the number of items to be reconciled, I take that to mean mails coming in / going out, calendar updates etc... am I right in thinking this?

The items to be reconciled are emails that have been read/moved/deleted. Reconciliation is only for email so when I say items to be reconciled I mean email changes.

A common misconception is that email reconciliation will happen in 15-20 minutes or less. That's not true, it depends heavily on the environment and the users.

But you can use perfmon counters to see if your Exchange server is performing out of MS specs. Personally I think that this issue is caused by the user being a heavy BB user and the fact that it's not taking 3 hours or more to reconcile. That's just me. Hopefully you'll find something else to help fix the issue.