troubleshooting slowness with my exchange server

[mlchris2]

I'm an exchange newbie and I know enough to setup and operate. I took over a SA job with the company I was consulting for.

one of my first assignments was to figure out what is going on with the company exchange server.

the issue:

end user connectivity is slow... keep getting Outlook error messages about connecting to the Exchange server, sort of like timeouts.

I've googled for PERFMON settings and have ran it on the exchange server for a few days.

the layout:

corporate office contains 60 end users with mailbox sizes ranging from 2GB - 40MB with 21,000-55 items.

the exchange server is a P4 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM... Virtual Memory is set to MIN 1.5GB MAX 3072GB. all of the companies production servers are located in a Coloction center. a PTP 1.5MB T1 connection connects the Corp office with the Collocation.

I am running SMS for Exchange on the server as well.


I have a feeling it might be the server hardware(memory) or VM config causing the problem. I read that the size of mailboxes doest matter, its how many items in the folder a user is viewing that might cause the slowness.

Can any of you suggest any other things I can test to figure out the issues? Recommendations welcome as well

thanks

mark c
digital draw network

Mark C.

 

[Koonan]

Are all of the users seeing this problem, or just the ones with 21,000 items their folders?

A T1 doesn't mean much unless you know how much available bandwidth there is. If your T1 is over used everyone will see problems.

Running a MAPI client over a WAN link always causes problems. What version of Outlook are you using? If you are using Outlook 2003, you can use Cache Mode and RPC over HTTP to help with the WAN connection issues.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...371-86dc-4839-9732-5a85525a0874.mspx?mfr=true

 

[MiniOrganMorgan]

Have you run the ever useful Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer Tool available from

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=55884

Might be handy in giving you some clues.

Generally, in my experience Exchange performance issues are directly related to the disk performance of where the Exchange logs are written.

 

[mlchris2]

thank for the response....

Every user regardless of mailbox size/qty see this error?

I have been monitoring bandwidth on the T1... hoping to have more info. however, I believe the issue is lack of bandwidth.

After the IT manager came back from vacation, I learned that we have been running on a backup server (we use a product called NeverFail) and this server is suffient enough for a backup server, but not as good as our primary. So i need to make that change and see how performance is.

I will keep you updated.

thanks again

Mark C.

 

[MoobyCow]

You might want to try bandwidth throttling on the Neverfail service. Replication can eat up a lot of bandwith and often times a T1 is not sufficient.

Also, if all of your servers (file/DB as well?) are at a colo you will almost certainly need more than a single T1 for 60 users.

If you have Office 2003 make sure you turn on cached Exchange mode. That is a very small pipe for 60 users to be connecting to Exchange.