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marc4497

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Exchange 2007 SP1 Log files grow out of control (10GB/hr ~3 hours +)

I have an exchange 2007 SP1 CCR cluster and the active node log files grow out of control at about 10GB per hour with no database growth, No accounts seem to grow either and there are no indications in message tracking that this amount of data is being transmitted during the symptom time. I've ran the client monitor and saw nothing unusual. A backup clears the logs naturally. The symtoms stop as randomly as they start with no indication as to what is generating or how we can stop the sudden growth. There is enough space on the disk for this to happen for a long period of time (150GB ~15 hours) but my client is worried that it might occur for a longer period. The longest observed is around 9 hours. Restarting one of the hub transport servers (nlb clustered) seems to stop the growth but it doesnt matter which one (of the two) is restarted. This could simply be coincidence. Any help is greatly appreciated.
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firemanf29
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The Exchange Database will only grow if it has no free/available space within it. Remember Exchange deletes emails inside of it's database but does not resize or shrink the database after a delete.

10 GB an hour does seem large but you may just have that many tractions happening.  Any idea how many emails are coming in and going out?  To me that size would require thousands of transactions per minute.

Have you made sure your Exchange 2007 server is not relaying spam?
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marc4497

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the server is not relaying spam. also, checked message tracking and there are no indications of this many emails being sent/recieved. It's not doing 10GB per hour all the time, just randomly for a period of time (sometimes 1 hour, sometimes 3 hours, sometimes 9...). Emails in and out are below 100 per hour. Size limits are set to 5 or 10 mb per message depending on user. The last occurance was this morning from 4:46am to 8:19am. There was no one in the office during this time (maybe 20 users logged in around 8 am and the rest start trickling in after that (650 users total).
you are right in saying that would require thousands of transactions per minute. Moving a file from one folder to another causes transaction log data; but I can assure you this isnt happening. There is no mailbox management in place so this is not the culprit either. they do have journalling enabled but that mailbox is not growing at the rate in which the transaction logs are (its below 1GB).

I should add; this is only happening on 1 database. there are 3 different databases on this server each with different log file paths. it is only this 1 database creating the transaction logs; the other 2 do not. Client also indicated that during the peak of this activity, outlook clients and the server itself are extremely sluggish.
Is the journal mailbox in the same mailbox store as the database having large transaction files?
no it is not; it is on a different store.
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marc4497

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