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Metalogix Essentials for Office 365 2.7 - Performance Optimization Guide

Content Data Flow

This is a good place to remind you that the Architecture of the software means that your content

(migration or backup) will travel through the Essentials for Office 365 as it is deployed on its host machine.  

Keep that in mind when you are looking into your network bandwidth.  If you are backing up a SharePoint Online site to Amazon S3 storage, that content is being downloaded to the host machine (temporarily) and then uploaded to your Amazon S3 storage, so both download and upload operations to consider for bandwidth allocation.

Frequently Asked Questions and Scenarios

Here is a collection of questions and scenarios that users have sent us over the years.

Q:  How many copies of Essentials for Office 365 can I run at one time?  Is there a performance benefit?

A:  You can run as many copies (instances) as your host system can support, however it is important to understand the hosts limitations (CPU, memory, hard disk space, network bandwidth) before running additional instances.  While it can provide a performance increase, the preferred approach would be to run parallel operations within the same, single instance of Essentials as resources can be conserved and allocated as required.

Q:  Does running more than one copy of Essentials for Office 365 cause instability?

A:  It can if the host computer runs low on system resources.  When Windows runs low on resources (memory, disk space, etc.) this software like any other can become unstable or unresponsive.  If you plan to run multiple, concurrent instances please be conscious of the resource availability on the host.

Q:  For memory allocation, how much is enough?  How much is too much?

A:  For maximum performance, as much as you can allocate using the following guidelines.  Do not exceed 50% of the total physical memory in the host.  If the host machine has 8GB of total memory, do not allocate more than 4GB to Essentials.  And remember, if you run 2 instances of Essentials configured with 4GB of memory, then you may actually consume a total of 8GB which is 100% of the hosts total resources.  

This can and probably will lead to instability.

Q:  How many parallel operations can I run in a single instance?  Is there a performance gain from this configuration?

A:  Similar to running several copies of Essentials, a performance gain is certainly possible.  Multi-threaded operations like these are the preferred method since the software can better handle the resource consumption of the host.  You still need to be conscious of the total resource availability, however the software will not consume more than what it has been configured.

Next Steps

Now that you have read through the various ways to consider and optimize the performance of Essentials for Office 365, its time to start using it.

Please review the all our documentation to better understand the usage of the software:



This guide is designed to provide you with a self-service approach to answering some frequently presented scenarios we have encountered over the years.  Due to the complex nature of everyones unique environmental configuration we cannot possibly address every situation, although we do hope it serves as a valuable resource to improve your migration and backup performance or at least help you consider some area that you may have otherwise overlooked.


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