I’ve Made A Huge Mistake

A category that is near and dear to my heart. I wrestled with a performance problem for quite some time and every week or so I see someone posting a similar problem over in the Exchange forums and there are usually the same base of links and questions that really help someone determine or overcome their performance issues. So I’m going to keep a collection here. If you have things I think I should add please let me know.

General Questions

1.) What time of day do you experience the performance problem?

2.) How many users are affected? What is in common with these users? (Same network segment? All same Storage Group?)

3.) What mode is there Outlook client in (Online or Cached mode)?

4.) Are you using a desktop search engine (Google Desktop Search, XOBNI, Live Search, etc)?

5.) Do you have an anti virus installed on the Exchange server, is it Exchange aware?

6.) Have you run Exchange Best Practice Analyzer?

7.) Have you run Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer?

8.) Are there blackberries or ActiveSync devices in the environment and how many?

9.) Has ExMon show any interesting data?

10.) Have you tried running the PAL counters to see if they show you anything different then EXPA and EXTA (I LOVE THIS TOOL)?

Some useful links and docs

Download Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4BDC1D6B-DE34-4F1C-AEBA-FED1256CAF9A&displaylang=en

How to use Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-2003-Performance-Troubleshooting-Analyzer-Tool-v10-ExPTA.html

Performance and Scalability Guide

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996078(EXCHG.65).aspx

Troubleshooting Exchange Performance (Helps you pinpoint what area might be the problem and shows what counters to measure)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997270(EXCHG.65).aspx

Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Basics

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/09/28/411674.aspx

Exchange Best Practice Analyzer

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=DBAB201F-4BEE-4943-AC22-E2DDBD258DF3&displaylang=en

Identifying Slow RPC Request Processing

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124154(EXCHG.65).aspx

Troubleshooting Outlook Dialog Popups Waiting for Exchange Server

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/05/25/405353.aspx

RPC Cancel Request Dialog Box (Generally if RPC Average Latency is over 100 MS)

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=839862

How to Change Outlook client behavior with Cancel Request dialog box

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833007/

Client Performance

Maximizing Client Performance

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124670(EXCHG.65).aspx

Showing Cached Mode vs Online Mode in IOPS (Search for “Effect of Online Mode Clients” Applies to Exchange 2003 as well)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738147.aspx

Disk Links

Optimizing Storage for Exchange 2003 (Shows Blackberries use 3.75 IOPS and why you should be aligned on 4 KB disk boundaries a MUST READ)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125079(EXCHG.65).aspx

A Few Basic Concepts of Disk Sizing

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/10/11/240868.aspx

More Thoughts on Disk IO

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/11/03/251743.aspx

Why you should use DiskPar

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/08/10/408950.aspx

http://almostdailytech.com/?tag=disk-alignment

Exmon Links

Download ExMon (There is a word doc included, read that)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9A49C22E-E0C7-4B7C-ACEF-729D48AF7BC9&displaylang=en

How to Use ExMon

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Microsoft-Exchange-Server-User-Monitor.html

Introducing ExMon

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/04/06/403409.aspx

PAL (A Poor mans MOM/SCOM with key counters to measure)

http://almostdailytech.com/tag/pal/