Exchange Server Standard Editon 2003 SP2 Boot.ini switiches and page file recommendations

Yeah leave /3GB switch its actually recommened by MS.

Other Memory optimizations for exchange 2003

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Optimize-Exchange-2003-Performance-Part1.html

The current switches now as of tonight are as follows /noexecute=optout /fastdetect /3GB /USERVA=3030 /PAE - This is good ....
To check if Exchange would run fine or not run the
EXBPA - www.exbpa.com ----- very important as many Admins run this once 2 weeks or a month to keep a check that Exchange is not having any issues after any changes in AD or DNS or anywhere :) :)
This would check the Exchange and configuration that Exchange and other Role server should have for better performance .....
Check the error and take care of them and all should be good ????

Hi all,

Thanks for your feedback and help. unfortunately since last nights changes exchange is running as slow as ever, even after the memory upgrade.

% Disk Time is still really hight. I have run the best practice analyzer tool and that has recommended two registry changes in particular which im hopeful will make the difference.

First recommendation was to set the SystemPages registry entry to 0 which I have done.

I have also set msExchESEParamLogBuffers to 9000. I will not know how these affect performance until a I reboot which I will do tonight so hopefully they will make the difference.

Any body have any other ideas or what else should i be looking at?

Have you seen which process take the maximum utilization and what is the version of Exchange (STD or ENT) ??
How many stores do we have and what is their Size ??
What all 3rd patry softwares do we have are they all upgraded ??
Did you try stopping the AV or others and see the server performance ??

Hi Rancy,

The top 5 processes are store.exe(1026MB), inetinfo.exe(40MB), mad.exe(28MB), svchost.exe(27MB) and uptmagnt.exe(26MB).

We are running Exchange Standard Edition SP2. We have one mail store which come to 41GB in size.

We are running 3 applications on the Email server, a HR app, a payroll app and a recruitment app.

I have disabled the Symantec AV but unfortunately still no joy.

To give you some further background on the issue. This issue first appeared 6 weeks ago when one of the help desk staff accidentally installed MS Office 2007 on Exchange. This caused a MAPI issue. We were only running SP 1 on the machine, so instead of re-install SP1 we upgraded to SP2. Which appeared to fix the MAPI issue. The exchange server itself though still runs chronically slow. Is there many server settings that should change solely because of an upgrade to SP2?

I have attached a screenshot which shows some counters which I'm hoping will be useful in resolving the issue

I have been working on the premise that this is a virtual memory issue which is bottlenecking when reading/writing to physical disk.The slowness users experience when using the hosted apps or email seems to correlate exactly to when the %Disk Time goes above 100. As you can see from the screenshot it regularly goes far above 100. Could it simply be a issue with the RAID performance or one or more of the hard disks? Anybody any ideas on how I can ascertain this and measure it?

Thanks,