I’ve found many articles and posts from people questioning why their Exchange 2007 uses all, or nearly all, of the system’s memory. My situation is the opposite. I have four mailbox servers (VMs with 4 CPUs, 24GB RAM, 8-12 databases each). Two consistently run with less than 1GB of free memory as reported by the Task Manager. The store.exe process consumes most of it at around 22GB. That is what I would expect. However, the other two report between 15-19GB free memory with store.exe using only 3-7GB. I found this while looking into higher than expected disk I/O on the second two servers. I believe the servers to be configured identically and can’t think of anything that would cause this behavior anyways. I would always expect Exchange to consume as much memory as possible. Any thoughts on this? -Carl S.

Are the page files set to at least RAM + 10MB? -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Carl Sanger" wrote in message news:5c3d5bee-c731-4d46-9f71-c415d2eb77af... Ive found many articles and posts from people questioning why their Exchange 2007 uses all, or nearly all, of the systems memory. My situation is the opposite. I have four mailbox servers (VMs with 4 CPUs, 24GB RAM, 8-12 databases each). Two consistently run with less than 1GB of free memory as reported by the Task Manager. The store.exe process consumes most of it at around 22GB. That is what I would expect. However, the other two report between 15-19GB free memory with store.exe using only 3-7GB. I found this while looking into higher than expected disk I/O on the second two servers. I believe the servers to be configured identically and cant think of anything that would cause this behavior anyways. I would always expect Exchange to consume as much memory as possible. Any thoughts on this? -Carl S. Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Also, check this article and see if you have a setting that might be limiting memory usage. http://mostlyexchange.blogspot.com/2007/08/restricting-ram-usage-in-exchange-2007.html -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Carl Sanger" wrote in message news:5c3d5bee-c731-4d46-9f71-c415d2eb77af... Ive found many articles and posts from people questioning why their Exchange 2007 uses all, or nearly all, of the systems memory. My situation is the opposite. I have four mailbox servers (VMs with 4 CPUs, 24GB RAM, 8-12 databases each). Two consistently run with less than 1GB of free memory as reported by the Task Manager. The store.exe process consumes most of it at around 22GB. That is what I would expect. However, the other two report between 15-19GB free memory with store.exe using only 3-7GB. I found this while looking into higher than expected disk I/O on the second two servers. I believe the servers to be configured identically and cant think of anything that would cause this behavior anyways. I would always expect Exchange to consume as much memory as possible. Any thoughts on this? -Carl S. Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

The page file is "System Managed" and 24GB across all four servers. They are paging very little, averaging between 10-20 pages/sec. on each of the machines. I don't see a noticeable difference between the servers with a lot of free memory and those with most of the RAM allocated to Exchange. Similarly, the “msExchESEParamCacheSizeMax” parameter is “not set” on all four servers. I should have included in my original post that these are all running fully patched versions of Windows 2008 Enterprise, 64-bit. They also run McAfee GroupShield v7.0.716.103. They are otherwise generic installations. I am perplexed. -Carl S.

I recommend you set it to a fixed value of physical RAM plus 10MB and place the file on a single drive that's best equipped to handle it. I don't know if that's the cause of your problem, but it's best practice. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Carl Sanger" wrote in message news:b3874179-281c-42e1-802c-6bb1374de5dc... The page file is "System Managed" and 24GB across all four servers. They are paging very little, averaging between 10-20 pages/sec. on each of the machines. I don't see a noticeable difference between the servers with a lot of free memory and those with most of the RAM allocated to Exchange. Similarly, the msExchESEParamCacheSizeMax parameter is not set on all four servers. I should have included in my original post that these are all running fully patched versions of Windows 2008 Enterprise, 64-bit. They also run McAfee GroupShield v7.0.716.103. They are otherwise generic installations. I am perplexed. -Carl S. Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."