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.
