On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 9:37 AM, Mayo, Shay <shay.m...@absg.com> wrote: > Just curious what type of performance people have had with large mailboxes > on Exchange 2007.
We're not on Exchange 2007 yet, only 2003. But my experience echos what others have said: Exchange usually isn't the issue; performance bottlenecks will show up in Outlook much sooner. Keeping the number of items in a single folder down will help more than overall mailbox size. Pay particular attention to the "special" folders (Inbox, Sent Items, Drafts, Deleted Items, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Tasks). Ideally, you want these to contain as few items as possible. Outlook hits all of these folders constantly, so a small slowdown in any of them gets magnified hugely. Even if the user just has a second set of folders for Inbox and Sent and moves everything over once a day, it will still help. The first time you sync a pre-existing mailbox to a new computer, it will spend bloody forever downloading everything from the server. Not much you can do about that. I try to put them on Gigabit Ethernet on the same switch as the Exchange server. I've found that once the OST goes over 3 or 4 gigs, OST I/O starts to impact Windows as a whole, especially when Outlook is first started. Also, the built-in Windows defrag isn't able to defrag it anymore. We actually went so far as create a separate, dedicated partition for the OST file for a few users, and found it gave a noticeable improvement. YMMV. If the users don't need frequent/offline/search for some old mail, you can use Public Folders and/or separate Exchange Mailboxes to archive stuff to, and exclude those from the OST sync entirely. Kind of like the "archive to PST" scenario, except you're not putting all your eggs in that woefully fragile PST basket. -- Ben ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
