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bigjim2000

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Exchange Store Memory Size

Hey,

I have a client who has asked me a question regarding the "constant grinding" that has recently started happening on one of his servers.  I looked at it, and a few things looked a little odd to me.  First, the store.exe process was using more than 1GB of memory, and second, the w3proxy.exe process had over 200MB of VM.  SO, I go into exchange manager, and look at the mailbox sizes... and they total to a little more than 1GB.  Is exchange storing a copy of the email store in main memory?  If so, is there a way I can cap this limit to something like, say, 500MB?  He only has one server (SBS 2000), and it has 2GB of memory, but exchange is still bringing it to its knees.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

-Eric
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Microtech
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Hi bigjim2000,
It is normal to see the store.exe process utilizing most of the memory on the machine. The store uses dynamic buffer allocation and when it needs to it will release memory to other processes. The true way to determine if you have a memory leak or not is to run performance monitor against the server. Include "all counters" run this from a reboot and until you see a performance issue and then let it continue for a few minutes during the issue. Exchange server will release memory when it is asked for, why have the memory if it is not used? This is by design.

What errors have you in the event viewer I expect something else is causing the server to "grind"? In task manager what is using the processor?

Hope This helps
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f_umar
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bigjim2000

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Sorry, the "grind" was caused by paging, not from some faulty hardware ;-)  He was used to the server running more or less silent.

Also, I'm not using the /3GB bootswitch, as I don't have that much memory, and I wouldn't turn it on for this OS.

I'll enable this counter and see what it looks like.  Do I need to reboot?

-Eric
OK, so I enabled this counter, and it keeps returning the value 38,731,776, which, if I'm doing my math right, is about 36.9MB... which is not quite the 1.02GB that I'm showing in Task Manager...

-Eric
Also, just for kicks, I enabled the Working Set counter, and I keep getting ~953,958,400, or ~= 909.7MB.

-Eric
OK, so I used the ASDI utility, and changed the max cache size on the store.  now it only uses about 606MB, which is much more acceptable.  I found instructions for how to do that from the first link f_umar left.

-Eric
BTW, the instructions can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=266768

I set the value to 147456.

-Eric