SBS 2003 Update for Exchange 2003 SP1 Issues
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My main server these days runs Small Business Server 2003, as well as Exchange, since it’s a part of the package. I haven’t yet installed Exchange 2003 SP1, so I’m glad to have caught this relevant update before moving to Exchange SP1. There are only a couple of minor glitches, but one is certainly notable. The monitoring tools in SBS will bark about Store.exe (the main Exchange message store service) chewing up vast amounts of memory. It does eat memory, to be sure, but it’s not generally anything that will endanger the health of the server since it’s pretty good about allowing other processes to use RAM when needed. The typical pile hoarded by Exchange 2003 after SP1 will appear to increase a bit, which is actually by design, as explained by Evan Dodds on his Exchange blog. It’s simply a matter of reporting… which comes back to the reason for this update to begin with. Nice little circle, eh?
Just as an example, my SBS box has 2GB of RAM at present, over 400MB of which (prior to Exch2K3 SP1) is being utilized by the Store.exe process. That sounds like a lot, particularly given the fact that there are less than a half dozen mailboxes. Welcome to Exchange’s memory footprint. If I look at the VM Size in Task Manager, however, it reports about 30MB. The rest should simply be a Jet database cache, which is fine as long as it plays nice with other services. The problem with this perception is that it’s not always an illusion. Keep an eye on your own server’s RAM needs, and it might not be a bad idea to launch something memory-intensive once in a while just to see how Exchange will react (with the usual mention of mandatory backups and preferably in a test environment).
If you do find that RAM is an issue, the /3GB switch can be used in the BOOT.INI file to give Exchange more virtual address space to work with. This helps avoid fragmentation of the address space in the event of a busy server that appears to have plenty of RAM otherwise. Note that Exchange 2000 and SBS 2000 do behave a bit differently, and overall, my impression is that the 2003 versions handle memory noticeably better. Your mileage will likely vary heavily. [Furo]
