Exchange 5.5 Compaction

According to the Exchange 5.5 Resource Kit, "Defragmenting a database requires disk space equal to twice the size of the database be processed." Actually this depends on what options you use with the ESEUTIL program. At the very least you will need space slightly larger than the size of the database (about 110 percent). This is because the process of defragmentation actually creates a new temporaary database file.

Also be aware that if you are using the Standard version of Exchange 5.5 vs. the Enterprise version, you are rapidly approaching the maximum size for an information store - 16GB.

You might want to also consider adding a larger hard drive to your system and moving the information stores to the larger drive using the Exchange Performance Optimizer.

We also experience a similar situation, our
database did reach the maximum 16GB limit and
I had to defrag it to gain enough space to keep
it useful but we had a 200GB drive and defraging it was not a problem. In order for us to bring
the database to a more useful state, we stated
creating Personal Folders in our user's PC. Then
we had all our users put all the e-mail that
they wanted to keep on their personal folders,
thus making the priv.edb smaller. Now we urge
the user to only keep a weeks worth of e-mail
on Exchange and everything else goes to their
personal folders. This is useful too if exchange
crashes and you cannot recover the database. At
least the user's e-mail will be saved locally in
their PC's. And believe me I have gone through
this twice in one month. If you need any help
creating *.pst e-mail me at amrsag@hotmail.com
and I will give you step by step instructions.