Let's not go comparing apples and oranges.
What Outlook reports on the client side is different than what ExPTA reports on the server side. An Outlook-reported latency of 2500 ms is far different than an ExPTA reported latency of 100 ms. If ExPTA is reporting 100 ms or higher LDAP latency for more than 10 minutes, then your provider has a serious AD slowdown (for example, OpsMgr reports that as a critical failure, 50 ms or higher LDAP latency for more than 10 minutes is reported as "yellow" - potential problem). ExPTA should see 20 ms or lower on average for LDAP lookups. Exchange expects drive latencies to also average 20 ms. 226 ms is an indication of a very overworked drive and may be an indication of a poorly designed storage subsystem. Now, in terms of "archiving"; if you want, you can do that yourself - create a folder and move items to it. All you want to ensure is that items are not in the critical folders, as I mentioned earlier. Next, if they are telling you that, in the same data-center, they have to do an export-import operation to move mailboxes to a new server, they are just blowing smoke up your as.well, you get the idea. Move-mailbox wizard works just fine cross-forest as long as you have name resolution and all ports open. Exchange 2007 with sp1 has I/O improvements that AVERAGE between 400% - 800% improvement (depending on usage patterns). Just moving to Exchange 2007 could potentially make all your performance problems disappear. Sounds to me like your ASP isn't very customer focused. It might be time to look at a new one. Regards, Michael B. Smith MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: John Gwinner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 7:58 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Just HOW BIG are your Exchange mailboxes, white screens, and Directory access times Thanks Michael - so I assume this applies to both public folders as well as individual mailboxes (as some of the KB articles implied Public folders, although it didn't exclude mailboxes of course). I did a search on 'mailbox size' and didn't get any hits, but I didn't read all of the list, I have to admit. In our case, we can't upgrade so far - the ISP is saying that to go to 2007 we have to agree to a 2G limit for all mailboxes. So this isn't practical unless they change their policy. To do the upgrade, they want to migrate everyone to a different AD forrest, so it's an import / export for them. Regarding our current server, I'm surprised that 2500ms directory access is OK, that seems high. Maybe I shouldn't worry about it then. The ExPTA didn't like it: The maximum value of 'MSExchangeDSAccess Domain Controllers(DS005.somewhere.local)\LDAP Search Time' is beyond the error threshold of 100 ms. The measured value is 437.67 ms. The average value of 'MSExchangeDSAccess Domain Controllers(DS001.somewhere.local)\LDAP Search Time' is beyond the error threshold of 50 ms. The measured value is 154.17 ms. (etc . for 5 directory servers) Drive latencies are high also: SMTP drive: Maximum '\LogicalDisk(C:)\Avg. Disk sec/Write' should be less than 50 (0.05 ms). The measured maximum value is 0.226 (226 ms). Our ASP doesn't offer any kind of online archiving, which would make this all much easier. == John == John D. Gwinner Director of Technology DAZ Systems, Inc Oracle Certified Advantage Partner From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 4:20 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Just HOW BIG are your Exchange mailboxes, white screens, and Directory access times As I wrote, just on Monday, in this mailing list: J [John D. Gwinner] . ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~