We are planning some major changes to our exchange environment in the not too distant future but I am hoping that I can get some recommendations about the performance issues that I am currently dealing with in our Exchange 2003 environment.We notice drastic slowdowns when switching from Inbox to Calendar or Inbox to Sent Items, or similar switches. The app freezes and a balloon pops up in the system tray telling us to wait while one of the machines in our Exchange Cluster processes our request. Forgive my lack of familiarity but it seems like a caching access issue or the like from the client side to the server. Once the Calendar is accessed, switching between inbox and the calendar is perfectly fine. Any suggestions to address these issues would be appreciated, please let me know if more clarification on my side would be beneficial.Thank You

Mnemec, Are your users in Online mode or Cached mode? I'm guessing they are in online mode. Try switching to Cached mode. Then you need to find out where your performance problem exists at. Try running this for a start. http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-2003-Performance-Troubleshooting-Analyzer-Tool-v10-ExPTA.html Most likely they are disk issues, I would start by reading these. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c6084d20-9730-4ffc-805d-b957327604c6 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996078.aspx http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/10/11/240868.aspx http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/11/03/251743.aspx Also for general performance issues try reading this. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124328(EXCHG.65).aspx From the Client side a total number of items in key folders can also be a problem. http://almostdailytech.com/2008/10/09/recommended-mailbox-size-limits-in-exchange-2003/ Mark Morowczynski|MCSE 2003:Messaging, Security|MCITP:ES, SA|MCTS:Windows Mobile Admin|Security+|http://almostdailytech.com

Hello,Performance issue is something like analyzing the environment and find out the cause of the issue and gradually improve on it. Remember you can't get rid of the performance issue at one go.You need to first find out what is going on your environment.1) Do you face this issue whole day or at some specific time frame.?2) Was all the users were affected?3) All the users using outlook in (Cache Mode) or without cache mode?4) Do you have any AV installed on Exchange server? File level AV and exchange server aware?5) Does your user use desktop search engine?6) run ExMON utility on exchange server and check which user performing abnormal exchange RPC utilization.7) What is the exchange version and SP and what is the outlook version and SP?8) Run ExBPA and fix all the finding and suggestions.9) Run ExTRA and fix all the finding and suggestions.10) What is the size of the exchange database and what is the size of the mailboxes?11) Is Exchange server database and logfiles are at the same disk? 12) Where is the exchange server /temp and /tmp path folder pointing too?13) When is the online maintainance scheduled for?14) From how long you facing this issue?15) What was the last changes on this server and when did you rebooted your exchange server?All the above questions and answers to this matters and helps to project the next action plan for your issue.Arun Kumar | MCSE - 2K3 + Messaging | ITIL-F V3

Yes, we have received some postive feedback from users running in cache mode.We are still overhauling our entire syustem. The biggest changes we are making are reducing the number of mailboxes per store, creating more stores in more storage groups on diffferent drives. The reading I have done, mainly related to this article, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890699,have pointed me to our new design and structure. We are close in to about 50% implementation and the results have been postive so far.Thank you very mcuh for your help.Matt