Exchange Problems - Slow Emails

~J~

~J~

~J~

Soldato
Joined
20 Oct 2003
Posts
7,558
Location
London
OK, firstly I gotta say I'm NO IT Technician, so if what I say is in crap technical terms then I apologise.

I'm on contract for a company where the IT Technician walked out before Christmas, as well as my day to day programming the company would like me to perform day to day IT tasks.

Had this problem since last Thursday and could really do with some pointers as to where to look as it's just totally alien to me!!

We needed to reset the email service (Exchange 2000).

When it came back up, it said the Public Folders was too big and needed defragging. The filesize was over 15Gb and I've seen on the net this is the limit. So defragged it, attached it, and it's working.

But since it's come back up, internal email sent from A to B is taking anything between 30mins to an hour to reach the recipient!

There's something called "Trend ScanMail Real-time Scan Monitor" which I can see my message on the little console but that's it!

Is there anything I can test/do to see where the problem may be, some kind of diagnosis or something that I need to check?
 
Do you have enough space? Is the Trend e-mail filtering releasing the e-mail in a timly fashion? How about external e-mails?

You can try and send an e-mail to a colleague and hit send/receive to see if it comes in (as I've seen a few problmes with the send/receive not updating properly).



M.
 
External emails are the same, just take an age to go out and receive.

There's 2.5Mb (yep MB) on the root drive, but 25Gb on the Data drive where all the Exchange Logs are kept.

So I'd imagine there's something not right on the root, but don't know where to start 'cleaning' stuff seeing as all the Logs are on the D:
 
Well they've assured me that the IT guy before me use to clean up space on the C:, but they don't know what he did, so I've no idea where to look.

There's a D:\ExchSrvr\Logs which has loads of 5Mb files that need clearing down quite often, but can't see what files wouldn't be needed on the C:.
 
Although the logs maybe on C:\ where are the databases stored? If they're on C:\ you're in big trouble as you need a lot more space. I imagine also that the swap file is located on C:\ and there probably isn't enough space for it so this is why it's taking an age. My advice would be to get a lot more space free on C:\ ideally around the 10GB mark.



M.
 
Cheers folks, it's a nightmare, programming I can do in my sleep but show me a server and I freeze!! lol

Right, wish me luck, I'm going in.....
 
sorry, just to confirm:

I'm ok to delete all the directories and files in the WINNT folder that start $NTUninstall?
 
I take it you are getting a good backup of the Exchange system? We use Backup exec and it has Exchange delete the log files after every successful backup.

My understanding is that the log files are used when Exchange quits unexpectedly and it needs to recover data. It replays them beginning to end to recover the data so if you have had to manually delete them Exchange will not be able to recover the data should it need to.

----

We had the same issue when we were recruiting a new IT manager they wouldn't buy a new server so Exchange on our file server was a day to day battle to keep enough disk space and keep it below the database limit.

If the server is used for printing, think about moving the spooler files to another drive. You don't mention how much disk space the root drive has but it might be worth checking the properties of Program Files, Windows etc to see if there is a particular folder/program taking up space for no reason.
 
Cheer PR.

To be honest, the company will be going through a MAJOR overhaul in 5 weeks, but until then we're obliged under contract to have the equipment as is. It's about 6 year old, the Exchange server has 2 Pentium III's with 1Gb of memory, a 40Gb Harddrive with a 10Gb system partition and a 30Gb data partition, so it's quite old and is constantly going down.

We only found out a few week ago that there have been NO backups since October 2007, and Backup Exec just fails to run.

As you say, it's been a daily battle and someone like myself who has little IT technician/networking experience, it's been a huge baptism of fire trying to delete log files, clean spam, making sure the services are running correctly, etc, etc.

I've now managed to get 230Mb on the C:, I'd imagine the effects of this will probably take a few hours to see. Emails that I sent at 8am haven't come through yet, but one I sent 5mins ago has just come through so something seems to be working somewhere.

But thanks again to everyone for the tips, been VERY helpful.
 
You can delete the $Uninstall folders as long as you don't need to uninstall any of the Windows Updates which I'm pretty sure you won't need to.

As the Exchange logs are on D:\ that's not really the problem.

Might want to make sure the recycle bin has been emptied. You could move the swop file to D:\ as well which should free up some space but will require a restart.



M.
 
Yer, Also any blue folders starting with $ in the C:\Windows can be removed. These can clear up a shed load of space too

EDIT: Opps, didnt read above :(
 
download a program called treeview. Run it on the c: drive and it will display what folders etc are taking up what space.

Handy wee tool



Also i would advise you to get at least a backup done at some point. what's the error that backup exec returns?
 
If BackupExec is not working, at least use NTBackup and take an Exchange backup. Doing so will truncate the log files for Exchange.

TreeSize is another good program to see where your space is being used up.
 
The BackupExec error just says "Failed to Start" :p

Dunno what the hell you can do with that to be honest!

I've checked the EventLog but it just shows an error code of 0 which is about as useful as a chocolate fireguard!
 
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