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I know that Exchange Information Store (store.exe) is indeed a memory hog. So much so that it doesn't always seem to respectively release memory when other applications need it - causing the machine to be sluggish.

This is SBS 2011 Standard SP1 with Exchange 2010. There are about 30 computers on our network, most of which use Outlook to connect to Exchange. We also utilize SharePoint. There are 3 SQL Server instances, and I know SQL Server can also use up a lot of RAM - but they're already capped at 2GB, and don't even reach that limit. All 3 SQL Server instances combined use about 2.5GB.

What is very strange though is our SharePoint site gets extremely sluggish, and when I check it out, there's only a sliver of memory available (like under 1GB). This was with 12GB of RAM. So we just upgraded it to 32GB of RAM - but now Exchange uses about 20GB of it. We still have the issue where everything gets sluggish after it's been running for a while.

What I understand is that there's no option to put any cap on what memory Exchange uses. But with 32GB of RAM available to the machine, surely it shouldn't really need 20 of it. It's still leaving under 1GB available. Is there another way I can prevent Exchange from basically taking over the memory?

PS - this is a virtual machine on HyperV via Server 2012.

Jerry Dodge
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  • break exchange from that virtual machine. Install it on its own vm. limit ram at the machine level. – Daniel Widrick Sep 13 '13 at 15:39
  • @lVlint67 - break Exchange away from SBS?? – TheCleaner Sep 13 '13 at 15:44
  • Yes that's my fear - everything is integrated. – Jerry Dodge Sep 13 '13 at 15:44
  • Good idea, but extremely risky, and no one here is experienced enough to know how – Jerry Dodge Sep 13 '13 at 15:45
  • When you say that Exchange is hogging memory, specifically which Exchange process do you mean? How are you determining that it is Exchange? I'm running SBS 2011 Standard and I see store.exe using about 225MB of memory. I've got three SQL instances using a combined 2GB of memory. – joeqwerty Sep 13 '13 at 17:03
  • Exchange Information Store (store.exe) – Jerry Dodge Sep 13 '13 at 17:14
  • That seems very odd. Do you have AV installed on the server? If so, are the appropriate Exchange folders, files and executables excluded? Any third party software on the server? – joeqwerty Sep 13 '13 at 17:46
  • There are some other things installed including Trend Micro Business Security, Forefront email filter (although we just installed that, had the problem long before), but that's about everything else other than what comes with SBS – Jerry Dodge Sep 13 '13 at 17:49

1 Answers1

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If you have windows 2012 running Hyper-V, why are you running SBS?

Anyway, to limit the memory for Exchange on SBS 2011 SP1 you need to jump into adsiedit..

  1. Open up adsiedit
  2. Right click on ADSIEdit and connect to the configuration naming context
  3. Connect to the Configuration context
  4. Navigate to Configuration/Services/Microsoft Exchange//Administrative Groups/Exchange Administrative Group/Servers//InformationStore
  5. Right Click the informationStore object and select properties
  6. Modify the attributes to set the min/max memory size used by the information store: msExchESEParamCacheSizeMax and msExchESEParamCacheSizeMin
    • Size is set by number of pages. Exchange 2010 uses 32KB pages so you would set the number here by taking the size you want, convert it to KB and divde by 32. For Example: if you wanted to limit Exchange to 16GB, you would enter 500000 (16,000,000KB divided by 32KB)
    • I believe for SP1, you NEED to set both the min and the max values
  7. Restart the information store service (or restart the computer) for the change to take effect.
Rex
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  • ...and tons of people have said there's no such setting...? – Jerry Dodge Sep 13 '13 at 18:58
  • Who said there is no such setting? None of the comments say you cant, they just gave you alternatives. There is even a comment with a duplicate question that basically gives the same answer. Google also gives lots of info with the same info. https://www.google.com/search?q=limit+memory+exchange+sbs+2011&oq=limit+memory+exchange+sbs+2011&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j0l3.4614j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=2&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 – Rex Sep 13 '13 at 19:08
  • Yes I just saw that a bit ago. I've been chasing this down for about half a year now, our old IT company emphasized that there's "nothing you can do about it" that it's "just normal". Note how I said our "old IT company" – Jerry Dodge Sep 13 '13 at 19:10
  • Anyway, I did this and restarted store.exe, so now I'm waiting a day or so to see if it goes back up. – Jerry Dodge Sep 13 '13 at 19:11