Can you please post an IPCONFIG /ALL from both the server and a workstation? That will be a good place to start looking at your issue.
Jeff
TechSoEasy
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Clients getting slow email response with SBS 2003.
Hi. I have a company with 5 workstations (2 are XP and 3 are 2000) and 1 server (SBS 2003). The server is being utilized as a file server, web server and exchange server. The server is an HP machine with Intel Xeon CPU 2.4 GHz and 512MB RAM. The server is partitioned with 1.8GB free on the C drive where the OS is and 36GB free on the D drive where the user drives are located. The server and all workstations run through a router to the Internet. My Internet is great but my email connectivity is not so great. I am continually getting the message Outlook is retrieving data from the Microsoft Exchange Server. I have gone through numerous Microsoft suggestions to alleviate this and I am now at a loss. All workstations are experiencing this issue but again Internet connectivity on all workstations is great so the issue is definitely internal.
Per my latest Microsoft search I have started monitoring the following items:
Physical Disk (All Instances)
- Avg Disk Sec/Read
- Avg Disk Sec/Write
- Current Disk Queue Length
MSExchangeIS
- RPC Averaged Latency
- RPC Requests
- RPC Operations/Sec
Processor
- %Processor Time
Database (Information Store Instance)
- Log Record Stalls / sec
My red flags are on RPC Averaged Latency which is between 21-26 (Microsoft says it should not be over 20) and Average disk queue length which spikes often up to 80 and 90 (At one point it was at 90 for several seconds).
My question behind all of this is what are my next steps to alleviating this slowness? I looked into adding a 2nd server just for the email but that does not seem possible in the SBS environment. According to Microsoft the RPC latency points to a disk bottleneck, does that mean I can add RAM and resolve this? At this point I am needing to make a decision on next steps by the end of the week so I can use the weekend to work the issue out after business hours. Thanks for any help you can provide.
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Answers
I'm with Bill_Huber on this one. Definitely sounds like a disk bottleneck exacerbated by the low amount of RAM in the system. You're probably paging a lot, and if the database or log files for exchange are on the same disk as the page file you could see slowness. I would put another drive in and dedicate it to your Exchange logs and databases. Different partitions are not sufficient as it is still use the same physical disk.
Also if paging is in fact causing this adding RAM could alleviate the issue as well.
also, check this out. i have not used it,but it looks promising
http://www.msexchange.org/
Jeff, Here is the IPCONFIG. Thanks for helping!!
Server IPCONFIG:
C:\>ipconfig /all
Windows IP Configuration
Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : SBSFS1
Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . : companyname.local
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Hybrid
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : companyname.local
Ethernet adapter Server Local Area Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : HP NC7760 Gigabit Server Adapter
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-0B-CD-D0-22-A3
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
Primary WINS Server . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
Workstation IPCONFIG:
C:\>ipconfig /all
Windows 2000 IP Configuration
Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : MARYANN
Primary DNS Suffix . . . . . . . : companyname.local
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Hybrid
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : companyname.local
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : companyname.local
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : SMC EZ Card 10/100 (SMC1211TX)
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-10-B5-A6-92-81
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.55
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
Primary WINS Server . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Saturday, February 25, 2006 9:01:50PM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Monday, January 18, 2038 9:14:07 PM
CT,
Thanks so much for posting that... it always helps to make sure that at least your DNS is in order... because that's generally the cause of the majority of issues regarding latency on an SBS network. The only thing that looks out of whack is your Lease Expiration date... did you manually change that to be 28 YEARS??? If so, I'm wondering if you manually adjusted anything else in the DNS or DHCP or even AD which may cause problems on your network.
Just want to also be sure that your client workstations were joined to the network using http://<servername>/connec
Please also make sure that you are using Outlook's cached Exchange mode.
Jeff
TechSoEasy
I probably should have mentioned the only change I made was adding 1.5GB of RAM. As to Jeffs question about the 28 year lease, all I can really say is that I took over this company from another tech support person and they set the entire thing up. I keep finding things like the 28 year lease and just wonder why? I am assuming this was setup so that IP addresses would never change due to the remote management of the company. The majority of the work on the server and workstations is done from a remote location so the router has rules setup for remote access with specific ports going to specific IP's.
Without fail, if I ever I used to "take over" managing an SBS that someone else set up, I would have to rebuild it as well as all the workstations. So, now I just require that to be done as part of my management agreement. But, I only provide fully managed service agreements, so there would be no way for me to accept a new client otherwise.
Jeff
TechSoEasy
FYI, The correct way to keep IP addresses from changing is to use reservations... but you don't really need to do all that from the router... check out this screen shot of how I manage remote networks: http://techsoeasy.com/m.jp
It's all done using the Remote Desktops MMC.
And give Bill the points... I hate to see a grown man whine. ;-)
Jeff
TechSoEasy
Sorry Bill, I am new to this community and just didn't realise I had to give the points. You totally get all the point for this! Everything is working Fabulouse by the way. One added benefit I didn't even anticipate is that my Veritas backups are running better. I was having an issue where they only worked about 3 days at a time and then I would get an error that the internal backup drive was not found. I would reboot and it would come back so I was really leaning towards a bad drive. I have not had any issues with the backup for close to 3 weeks now.
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by: Bill_HuberPosted on 2006-02-22 at 12:51:35ID: 16023318
most obvious thing to me is the amount of RAM. I have done numerous SBS2k3 installations and NEVER go below 2GB. The one that i am looking at has a database size of 8 GB, with ~ 30 users connecting and consistently pulls 700 MB of RAM just for the information store process (store.exe). when you add the extra RAM, make sure that you also increase the paging file size appropriately.
speaking of paging file, make sure that you have your paging file on you application partition, and not your system partition.
turn off microsoft monitoring...it is a resource hog.