For the past few weeks, during the transition from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2007, we’ve experienced a number of complaints of slowness in Outlook. Although the symptoms could be attributed to literally almost anything, we evaluated every possible option:
- Exchange 2007 server issues: does it have adequate RAM, hard drive space, processing power, etc.?
- Client issues: what version of Outlook are they using? Is an add-in causing the perceived slowness?
- Is it a result of a recent update to a file server, which was made public, and thus the slowness is not real but just a result of information the end user is applying to a different situation?
Today we learned something about our friend, C2C, which has been actively archiving nightly. As it turns out, C2C is eating gigantic holes in our mailbox databases which cannot be fixed with online defragmentation. It would have been nice to know this going into the whole upgrade, alas, the information was not available to me.
I moved myself to a mail storage group that contained only one mailbox database. Its function is to hold accounts until we have backed up all of their personal files to portable media. At any rate, it once contained mailboxes but they have since been purged from Exchange. After I added my little mailbox (~1.3GB) the total size of the mailbox database was 20.4 GB (22,004,252,672 bytes). I made a quick backup using NTBackup and then dismounted the database. Using the Exchange Shell I ran an offline defrag (eseutil /d %database_name%) and it took a little over two mins to complete. It’s recommended to perform a backup immediately following defragmentation, so I performed another NTBackup. After the process was complete, I found that the newly defragmented database was only 1.32 GB (1,423,548,416 bytes)! That’s a 65% reduction (if my math is correct, haha)!
I plan on performing the same defragmentation on all of our mailbox databases in an attempt to eliminate all complaints of Outlook slowness.
I know I’m just a simple computer science major, but does every database seriously operate in such an inefficient manner? Why couldn’t online defragmentation take care of the 19GB of whitespace?
At any rate, we’re almost there. I’m still migrating public folders nightly but their numbers are dwindling.
