Administrators have many responsibilities when it comes to ensuring the reliability and performance of their servers. But sometimes their responsibilities get overshadowed by just trying to maintain a set level of performance. If their server performance slows down or begins to degrade they must be able to know where to go looking to correct the behavior before it begins to adversely impact their end user community.

One of those areas that can present performance problems is in the area of memory. And as one of the main components of server performance – CPU, I/O and memory – lack of memory resources can be fairly easily solved by purchasing and installing more memory. But when more memory is not the answer then the troubleshooting process can be more time consuming as there are more aspects of memory usage which must be examined.

Many times the memory performance problems don’t show up until the software applications – such as Outlook – have been upgraded. Some administrators have reported performance problems with paged and non-paged pool memory as the number of Outlook 2007 client have been added within the organization.

To solve this problem it is necessary that the paged pool memory used by client connections to the Exchange server be reduced. This can be accomplished by reducing the size and number of access tokens. Additionally, the client connections can also be distributed and managed so as to optimize performance.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Pool Memory in Exchange Server 2003

There are many applications that can be affected by a server’s paged pool size. Applications such as Exchange server can report problems if the page pool size is not large enough to support the large number of user connections that are common in enterprise environments.

Sometimes Exchange server can be impacted if there is not enough paged pool memory. So what exactly is paged pool memory and how do you solve problems associated with a lack of paged pool memory?

One of the steps that occur at boot up time is the creation of memory pools. Two dynamically sized memory pools are created by the memory manager and it is those two memory pools that are used by applications during execution. Kernel-mode components use the two pools to allocate memory for the processes that are running. Those two pools are called the Paged Pool and the Non-Paged Pool.

The size of the physical memory helps in determining the initial sizes of each of those two pools at boot up. The pools are dynamic and so can grow in size over time up to a pre-determined maximum.

So how do the pool sizes affect the execution of Exchange?

Continue reading Troubleshooting Paged Pool Memory in Exchange Server