We have Exchange 2003 SP2 and our users have Windows XP SP2 running Office (Outlook)2003. Some of our users notice very slow response times when doing simple things in Outlook such as opening a new email message. It may take 15-20 seconds to do this. Or when opening Outlook at the begining of the workday, it can take 10-15 minutes just to open it up and synchronize with the Exchange Server. 1) Is it the Exchange Server that is slow in synchronizing with Outlook's pst file? Or is it the Exchange Server itself that may be slow? 2)Is there some kind of database maintenance I can do to speed this up? It didn't used to be this way, but most of the users that are reporting this problem are our executives who have 7 or 8 thousand messages saved. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks

Could you tell my a bit more about what type of server you have and how many users. How big is the average mailbox? Are you running Outlook in cached mode? Have you checked event viewer on the exchange server?? OHM www.moe.am/blog

It's a Dell PowerEdge 2650, Xeon Dual Processor 2.4ghz. There is 1 GB of RAM in the server. We have approximately 60-70 users and the size of the database is about 70gb. I don't see any errors in the Event Viewer. I usally set up users NOT to use Cached Mode. But I have not checked the users that are having these issues.

Try this link and go to section Monitoring Client Performance http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124670(EXCHG.65).aspx

Install and run the exchange best practise analyzer: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=DBAB201F-4BEE-4943-AC22-E2DDBD258DF3&displaylang=en And the exchange troubleshooting assistant: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4BDC1D6B-DE34-4F1C-AEBA-FED1256CAF9A&displaylang=en Oddvar Moe www.moe.am

Thanks for all who responded, I appreciate the help. Looks like I have some tuning to do. Unfortunately, our Exchange Server is set up with one big C drive, so I can't put the transaction logs on another drive (which is what it has recommended). So, I'm not sure what to do about that. I do have one more question. I do both a database backup and a brick-level backup to tape. Is there another way to back those up to disk. Does exchange have a tool to do this? Thank you.

Well sometimes when you have a limited number of disks, one big RAID is the best option and then there is little point into carving that RAID up into mulitple paritions. When MSFT recommends moving the logs off to another drive, they mean completely seperate physical drive(s) than the one hosting your C: parition. The reason for this is if there is a problem with the physical drive, only one parition is broken instead of a multiple partitions on the same physical drive. You should run the ExBPA in the 2 hour Performance Baseline during your worst 2 hour window. At the end of the 2 hours the ExBPA will try to perform an analysis of the various counters it tracks for you. You will probably see that your disk subsystem is not up to par, or your memory is lacking. Exchange is a memory hungry application and RAM is cheap. I would try adding more RAM to the server ASAP to see if that helps. Either way though the ExBPA 2 hour Performance Baseline should give you some serious insight in to your performance bottlenecks. Remember though if you are running Exchange 2003/Windows 2003 to use the appropriate BOOT.INI switches and the registry edit (there is a KB article out there on that). Exchange 2007/Windows 2003 64bit requires no such changes to take advantage of the additional memory. And if you are running Exchange 2007, then 1gig probably isn't cutting it. --- Why do you perform brick level backups? They are not space efficient and take up lots of space. If you need to restore mail for someone, you can use the Recovery Storage Group to restore the database and pull out the mailbox you want. If you are performing restores often for your users, consider increasing the deleted item retention so they can just undelete the email. Exchange has a native backup tool in Windows 2003 (they changed how backups work if you run Exchange on Windows 2008), and it's called NTBACKUP. Start -> Run-> NTBACKUP. This lets you backup Exchange to a flat file on a disk (local or remote). The problem is the tool doesn't have any alert functionality and the logs are all text based. Another option is Microsoft's Data Protection Manager 2007 which has just about anything you could want for backing up Exchange, including single mailbox restoration w/o having to do brick level backups. This solution isn't free though. Good luck!

Thank you for your post. Your advice was extremely helpful. We have a subscription to MSDN, so I have a copy of Data Protection Manager that I can load somewhere on a server. I'll try that out. In the meantime, I will get more RAM for the Server. Just one more question about something you said: "consider increasing the deleted item retention so they can just undelete the email". Where do I do this? Can you provide me with Step by Step instructions. I'm an Exchange novice. Thanks

On the properties of each individual mailbox/public folder database, you can define how low deleted items are retained, as well as how long deleted mailboxes are retained. Once you set it to say 7 days, users can use the undelete function in Outlook (or even OWA 2007 SP1) to undelete items that they deleted up to 7 days ago (the cleanup process that purges old items is a part of the online maintenance which is also configured per database). The only trick I can tell you is that Exchange will keep deleted item retention on every folder in the mailbox. But by default Outlook will only let you undelete from the Deleted Items folder as the Recover Deleted Items option in Outlook will be grayed out in every other folder. This works 99% of the time as normal users delete an item, and then empty their deleted item folder. However once and a while someone will shift-delete the item, which deletes it exactly from where it is and bypasses the Deleted Items folder (this is the same as how to bypass the Recycle Bin on the file system delete). Also some third party tools/utilities/clients will delete items directly from folders as well. Case in point - if someone uses a POP client like Outlook Express to download all their mail from the server, the POP client deletes the messages directly from the Inbox as it doesn't know anything about the Deleted Items folder. To undelete from any folder, you need to add a registry key called Dumpsteralwayson in the Outlook registry area. You should search the internet for that term to find the right MSFT KB article on how to do that. Good luck!

Thanks again. Sorry, I keep thinking of more questions. Although we do have Data Protection Manager 2007, we run Exchange 2003....will it work with that? Or do we need to upgrade to Exchange 2007? Thanks

DPM 2007 supports both Exchange 2003 SP2 and Exchange 2007. There is a slight difference in the wayit protects Storage groups between the two versions, but nothing I think you would notice. To find out more about DPM, what it supports, and the requirements, please go here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795539.aspx

On Sun, 6-Sep-09 00:38:56 GMT, Troy Werelius wrote:>>e" for $ 375.00 bucks!Check out http://www.lucid8.com/product/digiscope.asp So, how much is your commission?---Rich MatheisenMCSE+I, Exchange MVP--- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP