| The General Settings page is used to specify an SMTP server and a gatherer email address that administrators from external sites can contact if any issues arise when your SharePoint Portal Server is configured to crawl their site. In addition, this is the page where you can modify settings for Search and Index usage to balance the performance of SharePoint Portal Server. Figure 8.2. Settings within the General page.  Modifying the Email Address The email address you specify may need to be changed from time to time. To change the email address that external site administrators will use as their contact -
Right-click on the server object within SharePoint Portal Server Administration and click Properties. -
Click on the General tab. -
Type in the email address and SMTP server, and click OK. Specifying Search and Index Resource Usage In addition to setting the email address, you can also configure the Search and Index Usage on a server. Searching content and Index creation are two resource- intensive processes that are performed on your SharePoint Portal Server. By adjusting the resource usage settings, you are optimizing the performance of your server and assigning a higher or lower priority to one or the other (searching content or creating indexes). In small environments, it is recommended that you balance the search and index usage settings evenly. In larger environments, you will likely have a dedicated search server and a dedicated index server. In the larger environment, you should adjust the Search resource usage for the search server to Dedicated, and set the Index resource usage to Background. On the Index server, you should adjust the Search resource usage to Background and change the Index resource usage to Dedicated. CAUTION In the unlikely and not-recommended event you happen to be running other applications such as Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SQL Server on the same server as SharePoint Portal Server, you should not change the resource usage controls. Changing the resource usage settings on the server can impact these other applications, which may result in unacceptable performance.
To change the resource usage settings -
Right-click on the server object within SharePoint Portal Server Administration and click Properties. -
Select the General tab, and then click and drag the resource usage bar to the required setting. -
When you are done, click Apply and then OK. | 
