Exchange performance problems are sometimes quite hard to troubleshoot and figure out. Recently, we have seen some performance problems on Exchange servers being caused by “desktop search” products that plug into the Outlook client and then index mailboxes and/or public folders for faster searching. Please note here that not ALL desktop search products index mailboxes and/or public folders.
Two related issues that we have seen the most are:
- The sheer number of RPC requests that those clients can start sending to the server may cause a client-side bottleneck.
- The Exchange server gets hit with a lot of requests while applications are crawling mailboxes, increasing the IOs per user, and creating a bottleneck in the disk subsystem.
I wanted to highlight a KB article that was written on the subject, as it contains some mitigation steps for those issues, as well as troubleshooting tips that can help you identify those problems. It should be understood that I am not saying that ALL Exchange performance problems will be related to Desktop Search engines and of course, nor that the use of Desktop Search engines automatically means that there WILL be performance problems. This is, however, something to keep in mind, as perf issues might show up in the environment that never had such problems before and unless we are thinking of this variable too – it could be hard to figure out what has changed.
The article is here:
905184 Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 2003 performance may be
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=905184
- Nino Bilic
