Exchange Server 5.5

I'm not a server guy, but I can give you a few tips to help you determine whether the network is your problem. Check the frame relay usage statistics you get from the telephone utility. If you see a line that consistently operates at or above 70% of capacity, you've got a congested link and should consider upgrading the bandwidth. Something else to consider is whether the 56K link is CIR or "burst". Committed Information Rate (CIR) guarantees you bandwidth. Burst is how fast you can transmit providing there's space available on the line. During times of peak usage, you will be dropped back to your CIR.

If your Exchange server is a standalone box, two important indicators for load are CPU and Memory utilization. You should be ableto track these from the console. If your utilization stats are high, you might have an underpowered box and may get by with a cpu or memory upgrade. These would be the most obvious bottlenecks to check. Hope this helps. Best wishes,
- ck

well, i never do with Exchange, but other i have. Maybe if not all the machine lagged in order to see attachment or mail, maybe you should check the client from virus infection. Some virus is make windows client run in a long time to open an apps and hang. And maybe you can check your server too. is it get heavy load than it should be? Maybe you need upgrading your server or something wring with the exchange setting.

Besides of that, check also your network traffic and update your antivirus.

Hope Help.
http://me-solution.net

Brgds,
Tehnical support

(1) NT 4.0 w/a Service Pack pre-6a has a bug: TCP/IP can prematurely retransmit packets to clients over slow connections, dramatically degrading throughput.
(2) The drive with the Information Stores shouldn't be shared with anything else. Exchangeintegrity is maintained by a structure of transaction logs and database structure files which are constantly reindexed during normal daily email usage.
(3) With a matrix of interlinked files like above, there's a greater possibility of file/data corruption. Also, while Exchange runs on-line defrags of the Stores throughout the day, it cleans the holes in them but doesn't decrease the filesize. EDBUtil is one of a few performance & optimization tools that come with Exchnage. Run it against your databases looking for corruption, but be careful to only use the switches to check them first. Microsoft suggests that running the 'repair' or 'optimize' options when the databases don't need it, can damage them.
(4) With that many remote locations, I recommend that you implement maintain more than one server. Even just an additional 1 or 2 serving as hubs would improve performance.
(5) Regardless of above, if you're still maintaining Personal Address Books (.pab's), store them local to their owners. The less going across the wire the better.
(6) Exchange server-client & site-to-site communications are handled by Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). So are other Microsoft app's communications. RPC creates an Open (something-or-other) link between servers (view in Server Manager). I don't know about Win 2000, but in NT 4.0, (a) These links don't always close and (b) only a max. of 40 links can be maintained

See Microsoft site "Exchange Resource Guide" for more optimization tasks.

Of course...it could be the circuit.... ;>)

I have a very similar network, 16 locations all connected through a frame relay network to a single exchange server....We have found that the frame connection to the host site (where the exchange server is located) is extremely over-utilized. We have adjusted both the port speed and CIR on that circuit and have realized much better performance. You will also want to look at the utilization of each of your locations....and where necessary increase the port speed and or CIR of that frame segment. A 56K commection is rather slow, especially when trying to download a 4 or 5 megabyte attachment in an email message.

Some other things to consider:
1. Make sure your users do not use the preview pane in Outlook, using it will cause every email that is highlighted to download from the server.
2. Limit the size of file attachments on your exchange server.
3. Limit the size of user mailboxes on your exchange server (larger mailboxes will slow user access, and overall server performance)
4. Make sure your exchange server has LOTS of RAM...exchange loves ram...we have an exchange server with 500 mail accounts, and we have 4 gigabytes of RAM...
5. IF your exchange server is running Win NT, consider upgrading to Win2000, it will improve overall system performance.

If you want the ability to see what is going on with your network traffic, you may want to consider a product like Packeteer (www.packeteer.com)..

Hope this helps...

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