Autopilot Reviews

W2K News:
Which Machines Would Get An AutoPilot Performance Boost?

PlanetIT published an article on this, earlier this year. It was done by independent and objective testers without a commercial interest. I'm giving you an extract here, and the link to the full article is at the end, and I suggest you check out the PlanetIT site. It's cool.

"Sunbelt Software claims that its product, AutoPilot, can increase the performance of Microsoft Exchange servers by as much as 40 percent. One school of thought recommends that you optimize server performance by adding additional CPUs, memory or faster disk drives. But AutoPilot is supposed to increase performance simply through software. It uses modules that run like NT services at the kernel level. The company claims that by carefully applying fuzzy logic and neural networking code that reschedules tasks and prioritizes threads, performance gains will be greater than the overhead needed to run the additional code.

"In essence, AutoPilot continually monitors the state of the OS, of each processor and of each thread, and it determines which thread should run next. That sounds pretty impressive, but does it work?

"To test AutoPilot, we ran it on a generic Intel dual-processor Pentium III/600 with 512 MB of RAM and 32 clients. This was a "pure" Microsoft Exchange server, running Exchange 2000 under Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Using parameter-measuring software, we ran a variety of tests with AutoPilot turned on and also with the software turned off. The expected performance boosts not only weren't there -- they were hardly even measurable. This was disappointing, to say the least. Then something pretty obvious occurred to us: If the product was dealing with prioritization, there wouldn't be any contention on a server running only one program.

"So with that theory in mind, we loaded Microsoft SQL Server and MS IIS on our test server. We then started doing large SQL queries and Web page hits in addition to sending varying sizes of mail packets back and forth between our Outlook client PCs. AutoPilot kicked in, and it worked! We saw substantial performance boosts -- not 40 percent, mind you, but improvements of between 15 percent and 28 percent, depending on what processes were in play on the server.

"The optimal environment for AutoPilot is a system that is receiving a wide mixture of requests. If your Exchange servers also host SQL Server, SMS Server or any other programs that are in contention for CPU and memory, then AutoPilot will definitely be worth purchasing. Granted, this all depends on your budget, as additional CPUs and RAM are often better solutions, but AutoPilot is certainly worth trying out. If you obtain the gains we did, it may well be worth your investment".

The only thing I can add, is that this is of course also true for your workstations. Got lots of stuff running, all contending for resources? AutoPilot should do a good job.