We are a small business company having30 email users. We are running Exchange 2007 Enterprise Edition + SP1 on the following server. Dell SC440 Server INTEL Xeon 3040 @ 1.86GHz 4GB RAM SATA RAID (C-DRIVE--40GB D-Drive--80GB) OS: Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition SP2 Antivirus: Symantec End Point Protection We have installed all Exchange roles on the above server. We have average email traffic, no huge attachments. After about a week or so system becoms Zomboie. Respond very slow. SMTP works very slow and POP3 service does not work at all. There is no clue in the event log. After restarting the server everything runs smooth for a week and then again same thing. Any suggestion would be much appreciated. Thanks Jen.

Jen, Have you tried to run the best pratice analyzer to check for issues ? Johan

I am not familiar with Symantec End Point Protection. If it is a file system antivirus scanner, then check to make sure the appropriate Exchange directory exclusions are in place. You might be able to still log on to the server before rebooting it, and if so take a look at task manager. Make sure no process is beating up your processors, that you still have available memory, and that your disks aren't pegged out. If you can't get on the server, then you will want totrack why your server appears to be dying, and to do so I would first create a log of performance metrics of the server, and refer to that when the server starts to die. To do so I would run a remote PERFMON against the server every 15 minutes to collect vital statistics such as Disk counters, Processor counters, Memory counters, and Process counters. You would configure the PERFMON running against the server to dump all that data in a log file, and when the server becomes unresponsive you would stop the logging and go load the data and see if the physical and virtual memory is all used up. If so check which process was eating it all as you might have a memory leak. If nothing else you should make sure you are running the latest firmware, drivers, and agents from Dell. Also make sure Windows Update thinks you are up to date as well. Good Luck.

I have tried Echange BPA, nothing shows up.

I am not sure what settings you chose in the ExBPA, but I wasn't suggesting to use that tool. If your server is running out of resources, then I would start with performance information from Windows. I.E. Use Task Manager for a quick spot check at the very least, but Windows PERFMON will give you more detailed information that you can track over a period of time. I have seen processes on servers from third party vendors leak memory and just start eating more and more memory on the server until the box has no more memory left for Exchange or Windows itself. Those boxes slowly grind to a halt and the only solution is areboot. The cycle just starts all over though until the leaky application is either removed or updated. I'm not saying this is what is happening in your case, just what could be happening.

Yep, I agree with HotFix, you canmonitor the performance of the server when it gives very slow respond and see what the bottleneck is. If you dont want to add counters manually in PerfMon then you can try Performance Monitor Wizard also which has pre-definedOS & Exchange counters.

I would use Performance Monitor to log CPU, MEM and other relevant counters over time to get an indication of what is happening. If might be a pacth is need with your virus scanner ect.

Good idea to have Perfwiz or perfmon running. I would suggest to use Perfwiz tool (this can be downloaded from Microsoft Download Website) and configure on a non-Exchange running servers, so that there won't be any overload on the server while taking Performance counters. Also try to disabling TCP Chimney, Enable RSS, Enable TCPA in following registry HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\TCPIP\Parameters Set the value to 0 You need to reboot the server after disabling from registry. I think Exchange 2007 has minimum memory requriemets for each role. Just did an Googled and found relevant information and I thought this might help to plan it properly. http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/16/432222.aspx- Exchange 2007 Processor and Memory Recommendations