Exchange STORE.EXE unpredictable sizes

[mrbusy]

I have a really bizarre problem with Exchange and I'm not entirely sure how to proceed. Last week, purely through a chance viewing of the Event Log on our Exchange server, I noticed that STORE.EXE appeard to have a memory leak. The process was running at around 800MB in size on a server with a single GB of memory, and after the OS chunk there was less than 40 MB remaining.

I tried what I could, restarting services etc, but STORE.EXE would always creep back up to consum all the memeory. At the same time the server would create an Application Event every five minutes saying event id: 12800, content engine, insufficient memory to process messages.

Having exhausted everything I could think of I decided to rebuild the server and have built another box to transfer the mailboxes to while I do it. This afternoon I have started transfering unimportant mailboxes (like mine) accross and something strange is happening. The STORE.EXE on the destination/temp server has gone up from a reasonable 44 MB to over 200, and the STORE.EXE on the old, apparently trashed server, is coming down a bit at a time. I have monitor running and with every pass accross the screen (1m 40s) the process looses about 5 MB in size.

I'm a little worried by that. If this is a proper memory leak then the process should stay at 800 MB, not start to shrink as data is removed (at least thats waht I expected to happen).

Watching System Monitor I can see that the old box does something every five minutes associated with the insufficient memory event (12800). This happens even though the server currently has 280 MB of free memeory.

So my questions are these:

1) Should there be a direct corelation between the amount of mailboxes on a server and the size of STORE.EXE? I've only got around twenty users, and ther're not heavy email users. In the past I've worked with hundreds of mailboxes on servers slower than the one I have now and had no problems.

2) Does anyone know what Exchange tries to do every five minutes that could be causing the event 12800 to appear?

Many thanks in advance if anyone can help.

 

[PScottC]

Exchange will attempt to use all available memory on the system.

What version and SP of Windows are you Running?
Whave version and SP of Exchange are you Running?

Here's an article that suggests the 12800 problem occurs pre-SP2 for Exch... [URL unfurl="true"]http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=320652[/url]

PSC

Governments and corporations need people like you and me. We are samurai. The keyboard cowboys. And all those other people out there who have no idea what's going on are the cattle. Mooo! --Mr. The Plague, from the movie "Hackers

 

[mrbusy]

Its Win2K SP4 with most of the MS updates installed, and Exchange 2000 SP3.