Download Randomization and Heartbeat Interval

[lilyviolet]

Hi everyone, I want to ask your opinions regarding the download randomization and heartbeat interval. For your information, the content updates are manually updated to the SEPM and the SEP clients will receive the content updates only from the SEPM. 

Question 1:

The Heartbeat interval is currently set to 5 minutes, and the Download Randomization interval is set to 12 hours. During testing, we reduced the Download Randomization interval to 10, 15, and 30 minutes, and the SEP clients successfully received content updates within the specified time frames. However, when testing with shorter intervals, such as 2 or 5 minutes, the clients did not receive the updates within the expected time. Could this indicate that the system is unable to function effectively with intervals as short as 5 minutes, or might there be other factors contributing to this issue that I haven't accounted for?

Question 2:

Given the SEPM server specifications (8 processor cores, 64GB of physical RAM, and covered for 3,000 SEP clients), what are the best practices or recommendations for configuring the Heartbeat interval and Download Randomization interval? Are there any calculations or guidelines to determine the optimal intervals for both settings? If anyone can provide the official Broadcom documentation or references are available regarding these configurations, that would be great!

Thank you for your help! :)

[Russ_V]

Hi Alyssa, 

Thanks for reaching out. 

Symantec leaves this up to you and the business since all customer environments are different. 

However, with that said we do have a white paper that provides further insight into this, see here: 
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/152136/sizing-and-scalability-best-practices-fo.html
See page 10+

Additionally I found more documentation that goes over this as well below: 
- https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/endpoint-security-and-management/endpoint-security/sescloud/communications-settings-for-group-name-v9209201-d13e2043.html

- https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/endpoint-security-and-management/endpoint-protection/all/how-to-update-content-and-definitions-on-the-clien-v38539566-d79e6/about-randomization-of-simultaneous-content-downlo-v38684184-d79e501.html

I hope this helps. 

Best,

Russ_V