Performance Improvements in Exchange 2003

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There are several additions to Exchange 2003 that help organizations better improve the performance of their Exchange servers. Exchange 2003 includes improvements such as better memory allocation and management through technologies that cache distribution lists and Global Catalog information as well as message notification suppression.

Performance improvements not only decrease the overhead of a server, enabling an organization to grow its organization, but performance improvements also enable an organization to minimize the number of servers needed in its environment. If an organization with five Exchange servers can decrease performance demands by 20%, the organization can eliminate an entire server from its network environment with no performance degradation seen by users.

Allocating Memory to Improve Performance

One of the improvements in Exchange 2003 is the ability to optimize the memory for servers greater than 1GB. This is actually a function of Windows 2003 memory management, which enables memory to be tuned between kernel and application memory. Rather than allocating memory equally between kernel and application memory, an organization can specifically allocate memory about 1GB to optimize kernel memory.

Chapter 33 covers tuning an optimization of memory and other recommendations based on best practices for optimizing a server configuration.

Using Caching on Distribution Lists

Exchange 2003 takes advantage of caching of information in several ways to improve system and message environment performance. One way caching improves Exchange is in its capability of caching Global Catalog information on domain controllers. Rather than requiring a Global Catalog server to query the directory for each lookup to the Global Catalog, Exchange 2003 takes advantage of Windows 2003 Global Catalog caching. When an Exchange client queries the Global Catalog, the response can now come from a cache off a domain controller, thus minimizing the need to query across a WAN connection to a remote Global Catalog server or to put a domain controller in each location.

Additionally, Exchange 2003 provides caching of distribution lists for email message distribution. By using the cache for distribution list information, fewer queries need to be made directly to the Global Catalog database, resulting in faster message transmission.

Chapter 33 explains caching distribution lists and Global Catalog information.

Controlling Message Notification

Exchange 2003 adds a new feature that enables the Exchange administrator to specify which message notifications get sent from an Exchange server. Normally when a message comes in to an Exchange server, if the Exchange server cannot find the recipient, a non-delivery receipt (NDR) is sent to the sender. However, with spam messages accounting for 30 “50% of incoming messages for many organizations, the number of NDRs could be significant.

By controlling message notification, as shown in Figure 1.11, an Exchange administrator can designate what to do with message notification and can control the amount of responses generated from messages that might otherwise be undesired .

Figure 1.11. Controlling message notification in Exchange 2003.

graphics/01fig11.gif

Controller message notification is a tuning and optimization function and is covered in Chapter 33.

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Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672328070
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 393
Authors: Rand Morimoto

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