I agree with Simon (as will most of the other Exch admins here) that if you can just move the mailboxes to a different mailstore, its not worth doing the offline defrag. You get essentially the same result when you are able to delete the original mailstore.
Your speed symptoms sound strange, is it with everyone, or just select users? I would look at mailboxes to make sure you don't have users with tons of data and a million things in the inbox. If you can help it, keep mailbox sizes under 2gb and less than 5000 items in a single folder (IE move extra items to a subfolder). If you allow excess (as we do) just let users know its their call and they need to know performance will suffer. Also, how are your users connecting? Is everyone local MAPI? If you have humongous mailboxes, cached mode should help improve performance a bit. Hope that helps Troy -----Original Message----- From: Simon Butler [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2008 9:28 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Exchange performance Have you run the Exchange Troubleshooting tool on the server? How do you know you will gain 50% of the space on an offline defrag? You are prepared for the downtime? 100gb stores, that is between 4 days and 24 hours total downtime (the rough rule of thumb is 1 - 4gb per hour for an offline defrag). As you are running Enterprise edition and have not maximised out the number of storage groups, I wouldn't even be considering an offline defrag. Create some new databases and move the mailboxes, then drop the original store. I will leave it to others to post on the SAN performance issues. However, I will say that I have seen performance gains by REMOVING RAM. I get funny looks when I do that, but I have removed 2gb from 4gb machines and seen performance gains in the past. Simon. -- Simon Butler MVP: Exchange, MCSE Amset IT Solutions Ltd. e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] w: www.amset.co.uk w: www.amset.info Need cheap certificates for Exchange, compatible with Windows Mobile 5.0? http://CertificatesForExchange.com/ for certificates from just $23.99. Need a domain for your certificate? http://DomainsForExchange.net/ -----Original Message----- From: Travis Krampy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 01 November 2008 16:13 To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Exchange performance Hi All, I have been assigned to look at some performance issues on an exchange server. Exchange 2003 Ent, SP2, Windows 2003 SP2 4Gb RAM, 1 dual core processor, 2-36Gb hard drives (OS) RAID1, 2-72Gb Hard drives (Pagefies, SMTP) RAID1 Databases and Tranaction logs on SAN 8 different Databases, 2 Storage Groups (4 databases in each storage group) 8-RAID5 LUNS (200Gb each) all on the same set of spindels, one for each DB, and 2 RAID1 LUNS for the transaction logs (200Gb each, all on the same spindels) The exchange server is connected to the san using Fiber Channel The performance issues that are being experienced are mostly Outlook issues Changing from Inbox to Calendar is about a 10 second pause sometimes clicking on a message will take about 5 seconds to display properly in the reading pane moving from folders takes a few seconds for outlook to respond I am in the process of scheduleing some defrags on the databases. Each database is either at or nearing the 100Gb mark. I have calculated that I can get the databases down to about 50% or less. I am not confident that doing these defrags will imporve performance. Given all of this information, what else can I do or look at to improve performance? Could my SAN be a part of the performance problem that the users are experiencing? How could I find out if my SAN is part of the problem? Thanks Travis ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
