# 2003 SBS in bad way



## Afterdark (Jun 22, 2002)

Hi. We have a 2003 SBS server which has been going along fine for the last 6 months (when I got involved) with no new software or system changes in that time.

However, as of 2 days ago, it has been running extremely slowly both when trying to work on it or for users, particularly with Exchange. It is acting as if a process was taking up all the CPU or that the memory was exhausted, but with no one connected, the CPU usage is almost zero and there is plenty of free memory both paged and unpaged.

I have uninstalled a few likely candidates for problems, such as UPS software and also disabled the anti-virus but no change.

Looking at the event viewer (which takes 30 seconds to open) there have been a variety of Application errors but those for today are all MSExchangeTransport SMTP Protocal 7518 and IMAP4SVC Content Engine 1023 - about 20 of them.

Otherwise, the only issue is that store.exe is using up over 1GB of RAM (which is not unusual but does seem a bit higher than normal).

I am not sure what to look at next. Any suggestions?

Thanks.


----------



## jmwills (Sep 28, 2005)

I'm sure you have rebooted but this could be a sign of some memory going bad or a drive filling up.


----------



## Afterdark (Jun 22, 2002)

Thanks. Yes, rebooted several times and yesterday it took about 15 mins to shut down and similar to reboot, whereas I would normal expect about 5-6 mins to shutdown and restart. There is about 14GB of free drive space, so I don't think it is that but it is quite possible for it to be memory. I will see if I can swap it over from somewhere else tomorrow and see what happens.

It is quite frustrating as you can imagine - everything looks right but it is ridiculously slow. Which, of course, may well point to hardware.


----------



## jmwills (Sep 28, 2005)

It can be quit frustrating. In the event viewer I would start looking for I/O errors in the logs which would indicate a bad drive but it could be something as simple as a bad cable or NIC card.

How do pings look like from the server to external addresses?


----------



## Afterdark (Jun 22, 2002)

Interesting. If I ping another site from my home, the average time is 48ms but if I ping the same site from the problem server, then it is all over the place. One ping averages 280ms, the next 800ms and so on. How might this effect the speed of the server?

Also, what is the best way to check a drive?

Thanks.


----------



## jmwills (Sep 28, 2005)

Run chkdsk for the disk

The latency on the ping could be an indication of a bad cable or NIC card or a bad port on the router/switch. Start by moving the existing cable to anew port then using a new cable on the same port.


----------



## srhoades (May 15, 2003)

Are the drives in a RAID configuration? Have you checked for a failed drive?


----------



## Afterdark (Jun 22, 2002)

I've just spent a couple of hours with the server, replacing memory, running disk checks, checking RAID etc. and can find no hardware or cable problems.

The only interesting thing was that while the existing memory is 4GB, the only module I had of the right type was a 1GB one. When the server booted up, store.exe did not load (event ID 7000 "The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service failed to start due to: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion") but when I put the original 4GB back in, it did.

It is running Exchange 2003 SP2 and the total store size has been increased to 75GB and the total store size is currently about 40GB. However, quite recently one of the mailboxes has grown to nearly 10GB (there are currently no limits set). The mailbox concerned was about 6GB in June and while we know that he receives a huge number of attachments as part of his job, I wonder if this might be a problem area. We will move some emails to local pst files to get it back down to around 2GB and I will run the eseutil tool again later today and see if anything arises.

Fun eh?


----------



## jmwills (Sep 28, 2005)

You clearly need to put limits n those mailboxes and tell the users to offload the attachments. SBS is not going to load with 1GB of RAM.


----------



## Afterdark (Jun 22, 2002)

The latest situation is that I ran HD Tune (a disk utility) and it shows transfer speeds of an extraordinarily erratic and random nature. The server is a Proliant ML150 server with 3 SATA drives using a RAID controller, in what I believe is a RAID 5 configuration. 

I am assuming that it may be the RAID controller at fault but before I start replacing things, does this sound like it might be the problem?


----------



## srhoades (May 15, 2003)

Check the mail queue. Perhaps you are the victim of backscatter. Or even worse, I once had a users credentials compromised and the server was being used to send SPAM.


----------



## Afterdark (Jun 22, 2002)

Nothing in the mail queue, I've got everyone's mailboxes down to about 2GB max and there is no significant network traffic, so I don't think we are sending spam. Don't you love technology?!


----------



## srhoades (May 15, 2003)

Do have some sort of HP utility that can show you the status of the drives? Usually they are pretty good about predicting a failure if one is starting to act wacky.


----------

