The first server has SBS 2011 as OS with Exchange 2010 SP1. It is also used as Terminal Server alternative with Remote Web Workplace.
The second server has Windows Server 2008 R2 as OS and is used as fileserver and Hyper-V (which virtualises another server)
That being said, here is my issue.
Exchange takes up all of the Ram memory. I know this is an issue that has been discussed multiple times which leads to me reading all kinds of answers.
I know there is a way to limit the cache size via adsiedit.
I also know there are a lot of people for and against this fix. The people against say that messing with this can harm the server and that Exchange does a good job handling the memory and giving it out when the system needs it.
The reason why I want to do this, is because last week, people couldn't use RWW anymore. An error in the event viewer told me that there was less than 5% of memory available and it wouldn't accept any more connections.
This is a huge problem for this client because they depend heavily on RWW.
Maybe this was an isolated incident but I would like to prevent it from happening again.
store.exe takes up about 13GB and all the exchange processes together take up 17GB, give or take
My question to you: Would you reccomend limit the Cache size and to how much?
Thanks in advance,
Steve
< Message edited by steve@novatris.be -- 19.Dec.2011 11:44:24 AM >
Posts: 6812
Joined: 9.Jun.2004
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All things being equal Exchange is taking the space because it needs it. If your other services require the memory then Exchange will throttle back, if it can. If you are experiencing performance problems there are two explanations. 1. You have some app (anti virus, span, monitoring etc.) that is rogue and poking into store.exe and causing it to retain the memory. That's not unusual. 2. Your Exchange needs the memory and is refusing to back off.
Your solutions here are either to give the box more memory or alternatively move a load somewhere else. You either move your non Exchange work elsewhere or you establish a new box for Exchange.
Mixing workloads is never recommended and the whole SBS thing has been a kludgy balancing act for the whole 10 years of its existence.
You can't force Exchange to throttle back in the way that you would like.
All things being equal Exchange is taking the space because it needs it. If your other services require the memory then Exchange will throttle back, if it can.
Does it really need it? Or is it programmed to take all the memory it can take? Isn't it true that if I were to limit the cache size, that Exchange would use less Ram and would make more use of the page file, which in turn would lower the performance because hard disk is slower than ram memory. Would the lower performance really be noticable by the users?
quote:
If you are experiencing performance problems there are two explanations. 1. You have some app (anti virus, span, monitoring etc.) that is rogue and poking into store.exe and causing it to retain the memory. That's not unusual.
There is no anti virus installed on the server. The second server is running Kaspersky Admin kit but I doubt this would have any impact on Exchange on this server
quote:
You can't force Exchange to throttle back in the way that you would like.
Doesn't the cache size limit fix do just that? It limits the memory that Exchange uses?
I've read a lot of contradictory answers on this matter so I really want to understand this and read multiple opinions (with well constructed arguments).
Posts: 6812
Joined: 9.Jun.2004
From: Philadelphia PA
Status: offline
Exchange is programmed to take all the memory it needs. If Exchange no longer needs the memory AND something else on the server does need it then Exchange will hand it back. If nothing else needs it and Exchange has got it then Exchange will tend to keep it because it needed it once and might again. Why voluntarily give something up when nothing is asking for it.
That caching limit is not a good idea in the majority of situations. If you follow: http://eightwone.com/2011/04/06/limiting-exchange-2010-sp1-database-cache/ and all is well then fair enough, you're golden. There's every chance that all you are doing is moving the problem from one place to another.
Something of a late bump, but I found this while looking around for similar info. I think it's important to note that it's SBS, and not a dedicated Exchange server.
We've got a lot of SBS 2008/2011 boxes (Dell/HP) with varying amounts of RAM (8GB-24GB) and varying software suites that have all exhibited the same running out of RAM behavior. It manifests itself, fairly at random anywhere from once a week to once a year, in silently freezing the SBS box and requiring a hard reboot while not responding to local/remote login attempts. After it comes back up, it always turns out that the event logs all went silent at the same time, there were no issues in the event log before the freeze, and the memory usage was >95%+. I think it normally hands off the RAM fine, until one time something goes wrong with any one other application, and everything spectacularly breaks?
In every case so far, manually limiting the cache size on Exchange to about 1GB less than it's trying to use has seemed to stop the problem. I'm running through a bunch of our clients' SBS boxes, and it looks like a bunch of the SBS08 ones with Exchange 2007 already have a max value configured, though I'm not sure if it was done by Microsoft during some of the earlier troubleshooting.
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