Hi Jim,
1) Do you use cron jobs to cycle / save or prefer to cycle manually? Why?
We run a nightly cron job to cycle all our saved message files. Much easier since we probably have around 200+ saved message files spread out over 30 different sites.
2) If you use cron, do you find it best to cycle by file size, time of day, number of messages, or something else?
We cycle at every midnight. Some threads may not produce a significant volume over a 24 hour period but it’s much easier to manage the .old files since they cycle all at the same time.
3) What is considered an optimum number of messages to manage in a SMAT file?
If you use the old SMAT GUIs, they will handle large saved message files much better than the newer SMAT GUIs. The old version of SMAT was written in TK/TCL unlike the newer JAVA Version. If you cycle each day, you should have no problem managing the files using the TK/TCL version.
4) Do you archive SMAT files? For how long?
Depending on the saved message file, we may choose to keep only one cycle save before overwriting or we may choose to compress and save up to 10 days worth. This is all done in the scripts we run each night.
Hope this helps.