Question

Exchange Store creating excessive disk activity

Asked by: lukeca

We are running Exchange 2003.  About once a day, sometime more, the exchange store seems to go a little crazy to the point that disk access becomes very slow.  It is not taxing any other resources, cpu and memory usage remain low, but actual disk activity is very high.  I have verified this using diskmon.exe and store.exe is repeatedly performing write operations on the priv database.  At first we though it was normal, this is a 10 user organization.  There was an unused server and we decided to move exchange to it so that it could have it's own server and not slow down the main file server.  Well now exchange is just slowing down the new server the same way it did on the old server.  I have scoured the event logs and nothing appears to be wrong.  Are there any suggestions to find out why exchange is doing this?

This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.

Subscribe now for full access to Experts Exchange and get

Instant Access to this Solution

  • Plus...
  • 30 Day FREE access, no risk, no obligation
  • Collaborate with the world's top tech experts
  • Unlimited access to our exclusive solution database
  • Never be left without tech help again

Subscribe Now

Asked On
2007-10-19 at 14:07:54ID22905693
Tags

excessive

,

exchange

,

disk

,

slow

,

activity

Topic

Exchange Email Server

Participating Experts
1
Points
250
Comments
9

Trusted by hundreds of thousands everyday for fast, accurate and reliable tech support.

  • "The time we save is the biggest benefit of Experts Exchange to Warner Bros. What could take multiple guys 2 hours or more each to find is accessed in around 15 minutes on Experts Exchange." Mike Kapnisakis, Warner Bros.
  • "Our team likes having a resource that is more secure than just using Google and most experts using this service really know their stuff. It's nice to look here first versus using Google." Dayna Sellner, Lockheed Martin
  • "Anytime that I've been stumped with a problem, 9 out of 10 times Experts Exchange has either the accepted solution or an open discussion of the potential solution to the problem." Kenny Red, eBay Inc.

See what Experts Exchange can do for you.

Got a question?

We've got the answer.

Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Need individual assistance?

Our experts are ready to help.

If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Want to learn from the best?

Read articles from industry experts.

Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.

Screenshot of an Article

Working on a long term project?

Store your work and research.

Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Access the answers to your technology questions today.

Subscribe Now

30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.

What Makes Experts Exchange Unique?

Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.

Trusted by the world's most respected brands.

image of each brand's logo

Faithfully serving IT professionals since 1996.

Experts Exchange Logo

Try it out and discover for yourself.

Subscribe Now

30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.

Related Solutions

  1. Store.exe Exchange2000 high memory usage
    The server running Exchange 2000 is running extremley slow,checking task manger the Store.exe is usuing 800Mb+ of memory but very little virtual memory. The server hosts 24 users and has ADSL.. It has dual processor and 1Gb of memory plenty of free disk space. After re-boot...
  2. Store.exe memory usage
    We are running Exchange Server 2000 (SP3) on Windows 2000 server. After boot, store.exe uses about 15 MB of memory, after a while, this amount is increased to aboot 200MB, even though this server is NOT heavily loaded: 1 storage group, about 25 mailboxes with 10-15 users logg...
  3. HELP!!!  Store.exe memory leak?
    we use a W2K exchange server witch was upgraded from 5.5 (little did we know at the time how many problems we would have because of that) all of a sudden the store.exe started slowly using all available memory causing of coarse a system wide shut down of outlook. After I rebo...
  4. Excessive memory use by Store.exe
    Hi. I'm using W2K Server with Exchange 2000. Every few days, the server becomes very slow to respond, and it appears to be because it's using more than its available physical memory. For example, currently I have 768MB of RAM installed, but the total memory use is 814MB. The ...

Free Tech Articles

  1. WARNING: 5 Reasons why you should NEVER fix a computer for free.
    It is in our nature to love the puzzle. We are obsessed. The lot of us. We love puzzles. We love the challenge. We thrive on finding the answer. We hate disarray. It bothers us deep in our soul. W...
  2. SCCM OSD Basic troubleshooting
    SCCM 2007 OSD is a fantastic way to deploy operating systems, however, like most things SCCM issues can sometimes be difficult to resolve due to the sheer volume of logs to sift through and the dispe...
  3. Migrate Small Business Server 2003 to Exchange 2010 and Windows 2008 R2
    This guide is intended to provide step by step instructions on how to migrate from Small Business Server 2003 to Windows 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010. For this migration to work you will need the fo...
  4. Create a Win7 Gadget
    This article shows you how to create a simple "Gadget" -- a sort of mini-application supported by Windows 7 and Vista. Gadgets can be dropped anywhere on the desktop to provide instant information, ...
  5. Outlook continually prompting for username and password
    There have been a lot of questions recently regarding Outlook prompting for a username and password whilst using Exchange 2007. There are a few reasons why this would happen and I will try to cover t...
  6. Backup Exchange 2010 Information Store using Windows Backup
    There seems to be quite a lot of confusion around the ability to backup Exchange 2010 using the built in Windows Backup feature. This stems from the omission of this feature prior to Exchange 2007 s...

Cloud Class Webinars

  1. Avoiding Bugs in Microsoft Access
    Alison Balter takes and in-depth look at avoiding bugs in Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the immediate window to debug your applications, invoking the debugger, using breakpoints to troubleshoot, stepping through code, setting the next statement to execute, ...
  2. Top 10 Best New Features in Visio 2010
    Scott Helmers gives live demonstrations of the top 10 new features in Visio 2010. This webinar will teach you how to create compelling diagrams by adding shapes to the page with a single click, linking the shapes in a diagram to data in Excel (or SQL Server, or SharePoint), ...
  3. IT Consultant Business Secrets Revealed
    Michael Munger, Experts Exchange tech pro and IT consultant, pulls back the curtain on his very successful businesses and answers question on every IT consultant and business owner should know about. He shares secrets on what he did to solve the 5 most common problems in IT, ...
  4. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
    Quest CTO, Mike Billon, gives an overview of the steps involved in building a dunamic disaster recovery plan. Through case studies and an examination of software/hardware tooles for monitoring and testing, you'll gain a better understandin of where you are, where you want ...
  5. Organize Your Visio Diagrams with Containers and Lists
    Scott Helmers uses cross functional flowcharts, wireframe diagrams, data graphic legends and seating charts to teach you: how to ustilize all three new structured diagram components in Visio 2010, the best practices for organizeing shapes in previous version of Visio, how to organize ...
  6. How to Us Objects, Properties, Events and Methods in Microsoft Access
    Alison Dalter gives an in-depbth look at objects, properties, events and methods in Microsoft Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the object browser, referring to objects, working with properties and methods, working with object variables, understanding the ...

Join the Community

Give a Little. Get a Lot.

Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.

Join the Community

Answers

 

by: SembeePosted on 2007-10-19 at 14:33:04ID: 20112583

Exchange does maintenance on the database. What time is that set to? It is on the Properties of the Mailbox and Public Folder store under the Storage Group.

Simon.

--
If your question has been answered, please remember to accept the answer and close the question.

 

by: lukecaPosted on 2007-10-23 at 18:40:26ID: 20135846

Maintenance is set from 1am to 5am.  This is defiantly happening during the day, 8am to 5pm, so I don't think that is the problem

 

by: SembeePosted on 2007-10-24 at 08:22:42ID: 20139787

Have you got the indexing service set to run?
Anyone using desktop search tools that could be reindexing at that time?

Simon.

--
Once your question has been answered, please remember to accept an answer and close the question.

 

by: lukecaPosted on 2007-10-24 at 09:16:41ID: 20140289

No I have the indexing service disabled, and this server does nothing except exchange now.  Also I mentioned that I used diskmon.exe to monitor the drive, I actually meant filemon.exe and you can see that store.exe is just excessively using the disk, to the point that nothing else can access to the drive.  If you restart the information store everything is fine.  Or if you just wait it out it usually is fine within 10-15 minutes.  But this happens at least 5 times per day.

 

by: lukecaPosted on 2007-10-25 at 10:11:35ID: 20149292

Well I have opened a ticket with Microsoft, and we have determined that the IMAP service is causing the problem, we are just not sure why yet.  We only have one user that uses IMAP so I wouldn't think that should overload the server.  

 

by: SembeePosted on 2007-10-25 at 11:22:59ID: 20149956

Is the IMAP user a MAC user?
If so, MACs with their email client are notorious for thrashing the disks.

Simon.

--
Once your question has been answered, please remember to accept an answer and close the question.

 

by: lukecaPosted on 2007-10-25 at 21:56:02ID: 20153234

Yes it is a mac user

 

by: SembeePosted on 2007-10-26 at 01:33:30ID: 20154030

Get the Mac user to leave their email client closed, or use OWA only for a morning. I expect you will find that the disk activity stops.
One Mac user can generate a lot of traffic - notorious for it.

Simon.

--
Once your question has been answered, please remember to accept an answer and close the question.

 

by: lukecaPosted on 2007-10-29 at 11:52:33ID: 20172191

Thank you, on further investigation it actually seems to be because the mac is indexing the mailbox with spotlight.  If we disable spotlight for mail the problem goes away and the mac can continue to use the Apple Mail program via IMAP.  Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

3 Ways to Join

30-Day Free Trial

The Experts

98% positive feedback on 31,087 answers since March 2000. angeliii is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his work with MS SQL Server & Develoment.

He has also proven his knowledge of Visual Basic Programming, PHP Scripting and Oracle Databases.

The Experts

97% positive feedback on 10,752 answers since July 2000. lrmoore has more than 18 years experience in the networking industry.

The six-time Mircosoft MVPs specialties include firewalls, virtual private networking, and network management.

Testimonials

"...and excellent source for support... Kind of like having your very own IT dept." Electriciansnet

Testimonials

"I was apprehensive at signing up at first. However... it has already made my life as an IT administrator much easier." JaCrews

Testimonials

"WOW! You guys have great, active, and knowledgeable people on here." moore50

Business Clients

Business Clients

In the Press

"If you’ve got a question... Experts Exchange can supply an answer.”

In the Press

"...an invaluable aid for both IT professionals and those who require tech support."

In the Press

"where IT professionals provide quick answers on just about any topic"

Business Account Plans

Loading Advertisement...