Exchange Maintenance

[TB0NE]

I am relatively new to Exchange and am in need of some advice.

I have a dual PIII 866MHz w/ 1.5GB ram running Exhange 2000.

I have 36GB of disk space using RAID 5 with 20 GB free.

Periodically (every 30 days) I have to either restart the information store or restart the entire server because either Exchange stops processing mail or the server locks.
When I have to reboot, my event log only states that the system shut down unexpectedly.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is due to the Exchange DB and that it might need maintenance. Is their a way to compact this DB or clean it up in any way?

Also, the server is using almost all of the memory at all times (1.4gb) which may be related to my problem. I'm going to install more memory but this seems like extremely high memory usage given the number of mailboxes (50). I will say, however, that the storage limit per user is high due to the demands of this office. It averages 75mb each.

Any ideas? Any and all maintenance tips would be greatly appreciated.

 

[robbyb]

Don't worry about the memory usage. Exchange is programmed to grab all the RAM that's available. It will yield RAM to other applications that ask for it, but otherwise it will keep it.

Your problem is a difficult one.

I don't think that this is a maintenance issue. If it were, then you would suffer this problem much more frequently!

If you want to, there is ESEUTIL. You can use ESEUTIL with a switch to compact your database. This has the effect of defragging the database as well. But I don't like to use ESEUTIL unless I absolutely positively have to. And I don't think you need to. Check up on ESEUTIL before you use it if you do.

I think you should wait for the next occurance, and get more information out of your server in the meantime. If Exchange has queues, find out why there are queues. ESM should help. Right click on the queues to get an idea of why they are queueing.

Are you regularly backing up?

You've got 36Gb. How is this partitioned? Is that one partition?

HTH,

RobbyB

 

[TB0NE]

Thanks RobbyB.

I'm glad to here about the memory utilization and yes, I back up religiously.

I do have quite a lot of SMTP queues. This is, in fact, a lot of SPAM replies. I periodically go through and delete these from the queue. I average 50-60 individual queues with some containing as much as 20-30 messages.

I have purchased, but not installed, a SPAM filtering server and should have it up in about a month. I am not relaying but the server is still spending a lot of time processing all of the BS. So you think SPAM is my problem? Would this cause Exchange to bog down and NOT report anything to the event log?

Thanks for your input.

TB0NE

 

[speedracercjr]

I can't see how SPAM would kill your server? I mean unless you are getting thousands of hits an hour. But even then if its just plain text they aren't that big!

 

[robbyb]

I'd agree with speedracer. You've got a pretty powerful server and 60 or so queues with 30 or so messages isn't much to deal with. Especially if it's only spam...

Spammers will have a go, as soon as they see your server. Your server is probably busying itself replying with 550-Relaying-Denied messages.

Some thoughts:
* Keep a check on the CPU utilization to see when that goes high.
* I've know inetinfo grab lots of RAM and perhaps more than it should. Usually STORE.EXE tops the list, but if you see that inetinfo.exe is topping the list for any length of time, then maybe something is wrong.
* Check on your 3rd party apps. Got any on the server? They may be running away with your server and perhaps memory leaking. If you have, try disabling them to see if that makes a diff.
and lastly
* SP3. Don't know if you've got it, but Exchange SP3 I think has stuff that handles memory management a bit better. Might be worth considering?

Hope this helps...

RobbyB

 

[gosemer]

Check with you users to see if any of them are doing anything when the problem happens. we has a user on our exchange 2000 server had a crupt message in there trash folder, every time they went to close outlook it would try to empty the trash and loct the server.

 

[TB0NE]

Thanks for the input!

I am running McAfee GroupShield 5.1 and NetShield.

GroupShield is responsible for not only scanning messages but also quarantine and attachment filtering. I currently allow only 8-9 known file types. McAfee can be a hog.

There are no other 3rd party apps besides this.

I'll look into the other suggestions.

Thanks again.

TB0NE