After some more research i suspect that in the old version of Retain that is in place in our production environment and the version of the GWPOA daemon after the upgrade from 18.3 to 18.4.2 there is an incompatibilty in the SOAP communication that slow down the performance from 5 to 7 mail items per second to 0.7 to 1 mail item per second 

i see this error in the GW POA SOAP log for every mailbox ID that is archived:

/grpwise/po/log/0625soa.001:232:02:49:28 DD6B SOAP Error: Busy cursor [EA49]
/grpwise/po/log/0625soa.001:233:02:49:37 DD4B SOAP Error: Invalid cursor [EA05] [destroyCursorRequest] (<Mailbox ID>)

i have no good idea if the messages are archived correctly or not, i have only very limited options for a serious testing wheter the archived mails are now corrupted or not

i can exclude an SSL issue i could verify that the lame performance is even with SSL disabled now

Micro Focus now Opentext support worked on some retention timestamp issues, but the performance issue is still very annoying, we have no time window for a daily archive to last 24 hours instead of 60 to 90 minutes as before the upgrade of the Groupwise software

i guess the only sustainable solution is to give up with former Novell products and migrate the mail system to MSO365, the quality of the interoperability testing between products that need to work together 100% correctly to perform well has become too bad with the company i was in the old days proud to work for - i have worked myself from 1999 to 2006 for the Novell supoort in DDorf GER, in the golden years

SBARELLO1 said:

old version of Retain

And how old is that version?

Lots of the industry is getting painful about matching versions closer and closer in recent years, not just one vendor but all of them, MS included.

Have you seen this:  Performance difference SOAP with and w/o SSL ?

Especially the part in attachment.properties.

The guys of opentext should consider to hire me as freelancer in support. I could track down precisely the error. I have used some kind of reload retain integration ideas by hand, i can't touch my mail servers in production but i can use reload copies of the post office data. it is not SSL, it is the GW 18.4.2 GWPOA and the SOAP communication with Retain in the version 4.9.0.1 Build 380 that worked like a charm for years. With exactly the same environment just going back from GW18.4.2 to GW18.3 makes the big difference, i could not believe it on my own that the difference is so much. Poor former Novell, all this sell and resell from one hedge fond to the other has broken the company. Bye, bye folks, i am out here - my last post.