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A New Client

A client turned up our first full-time Mail.app Mac user with Snow Leopard today. I was called in because of attachment sending problems. It seems that files around 7MB would attach and send, but anything larger was failing. The entrenched support reported watching logs, etc. IIS was returning a 401 then a 500 for the sessions that failed, and there was no clear reason.

Troubleshooting

After a little inspection, I thought it might be the request size / http post size. After a quick verification, i determined that the registry limit was not interfering. I next examined the web.config, located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\exchweb\EWS on the server in question. Sure enough, at the bottom:

    </customErrors>
    < httpRuntime maxRequestLength="819200" />
  </system.web>
</configuration>

I increased the limit, and restarted IIS for good measure. The attachments which the server balked at now sent easily and quickly. Yay!.

Errata

During these fateful events, while working and trying to send a 150MB iso to another mail box, Mail.app went nuts and began eating RAM. In less then one minute, it had consumed 1.2GB and swap began on my poor Mac. Quick fingers and a killall Mail in a ubiquitous terminal window solved the problem.

For certainty, I wiped my Mail directory from my Library (I don't use Mail.app for this reason). Problem Solved.

Question

Why is this setting so obscure in Exchange?

I have to say something

The most annoying feature to geek-users of Safari is the practice of uncompressing downloaded .gz files. I find the whole auto-unzip generally useful. It's a problem whenever I do things like downloading the latest pfSense. I need the original compressed tarball. It has a checksum which must match for clean upgrades. As we all know, Safari helpfully uncompresses it an leaves the tarball - a waste - for me.

Today I forgot the special right-click-Download-file step and ended up with more .tar files. There was a new behavior though. The original .gz files were in the Trash! That was good thinking. Not sure if this is a Safari change or a Sneopard change, but regardless. I like it.

Hurray for the last bastion of un-themeable GUIs and retarded iPhone Application Rejection policies. They got one thing correct.

Additional Note

I recovered roughly 14GB of disk space on my MacBookPro when I installed Sneopard. impressive. 14 gb. I just keep wondering: What the hell did it remove? I have not seen or heard of anyone else recovering so much. The best other than me was 12GB, so far. That is doing it right as well.

Read any post you like. Read any place you like. In 1994 it was "NTFS doesn't fragment by design, it never fragments". In the later 90's it was "ext3" or some other filesystem "doesn't fragment". Later, starting in 2000 - OS X doesn't fragment.

Windows

It started for me Windows in about 1994, and hit a sort of minor crescendo around 2002. I was speaking - ON THE PHONE - with Microsoft Technical Support. They were telling me about how fragmentation doesn't exist on NTFS, and that the new object linking would allow persistent data across an entire network. Whatever that means. NTFS not only fragments, but it HYPER fragments. There are some excellent write ups on this phenomena, but it underlines a few points. The first is that designing fragmentation proof systems is a process of revision, at least in part, and not necessarily all "design".

Unix Derivatives

Pearls of Wisdom dispensed at the tail ends of sanity constantly admonish n00bs that Mac or Linux won't fragment, even if of other platforms will. Old school boards and such used to offer identical advice to the WindowsNT crowd. The sad facts are in. EVERYBODY FRAGMENTS. It's a function of longevity, slowly growing files, LARGE files in general and use patterns with the disk. Filesystems fragment very rapidly when you start running out of space, and no matter how large the volume, space eventually gets exhausted.

Leopard

Leopard does well, but even it has limits. My 700mb Thuderbird inbox has well over 4000 file fragments. (I run out of space a lot). I have several .DS_Store files which have more than 3 fragments. If you have space, if it can be done fast and if it's under 20mb, Leopard will defrag most any file on the fly. That said, if you get low on space, make your computer extra busy, and then handle large files, you're doomed.

The unspoken dilemma

One of the things which Windows Defragmenters have taught us is the value of reorganizing the disk layout. I can't tell you if it's honestly that valuable, but I can tell you if gives a warm fuzzy feeling.

There may be many ways and reasons which filesystems fragment, but they ALL fragment. People who tell you otherwise are clueless or stupid. The presence of software to defragment is nice and necessary for filesystem health. Get it. Love IT. USE IT. Profit.

_{This article is in response to all the clueless n00bs, drinking Apple's Koolaid and spouting ignorant stupidity as though it were lucid rational.}