Information store crashing

[danomac]

Okay, where to start...

I've been having problems with store.exe just randomly crashing overnight.

There are two things that I've noticed here that might come into play - one is the msExchangeAssistants is running its routine script to purge old junk mail and deleted items. At first I thought these scripts were causing the problem, so I changed the schedule from daily to weekly (Sunday AM.)

Last night it crashed again. I went and looked and there's no indication of *why* it crashed, but I did notice something - the primary mailbox store hit the magical value of 18 GB, which was always a problem with Exchange Server 2003.

I did some looking and apparently this 18GB limit is no longer there, it should have been set to 50 GB.

We are using Enterprise Version 8.1, build 240.6.

Has anyone else had problems with this and/or the mailbox assistants?

 

[58sniper]

Have you changed the limit?

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.exchangeblogs.com/

 

[danomac]

Sorry, the reply notifications were going into the Junk folder.

I've changed the limit but it's crashed since. I think I've now isolated it to the backup - it appears the store randomly dies in the middle of a snapshot. At this point I don't know if it's the store that's the issue, or if VSS is doing something to the store to make it crash.

If I reinstall VSS the backup & store will work for a day or two and then it will die, and from that point on backups fail.

 

[danomac]

I've confirmed that it is indeed something to do with shadow copies, so now I will wander off to another forum.

 

[danomac]

Well, so much for confirming shadow copies is causing the issue.

Apparently shadow copies was a side-effect, caused by store.exe terminating unexpectedly.

I have found out it is as I thought: msExchangeAssistants is running scripts and literally one second later, the information store crashes.

First this:

Event Type:	Information
Event Source:	MSExchange Assistants
Event Category:	Assistants 
Event ID:	9002
Date:		4/20/2011
Time:		3:42:51 AM
User:		N/A
Computer:	SRV01
Description:
Service MSExchangeMailSubmission. Stopped processing database First Storage Group/Mailbox Database (c4417171-5e25-4332-85b5-48270925cebd).

For more information, see Help and Support Center at [URL unfurl="true"]http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.[/URL]

then this:

Event Type:	Error
Event Source:	Service Control Manager
Event Category:	None
Event ID:	7034
Date:		4/20/2011
Time:		3:42:52 AM
User:		N/A
Computer:	SRV01
Description:
The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 1 time(s).

For more information, see Help and Support Center at [URL unfurl="true"]http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.[/URL]

As you can see, it dies one second after processing stops.

Is it possible that the assistant scripts can get corrupted? From now on VSS will fail, meaning I can't do any backups until I run a repair on the database.

 

[BobSchleicher]

This may not be your issue but I figured I would let you know.
Our store was crashing here some time ago and it was related to Backup Exec. I stopped all of the Backup Exec services and the crashing disappeared.
Now we use a remote Asigra agent to backup our Exchange server.

 

[danomac]

Okay, after looking into this, I discovered some update happened and MSXML got unregistered.

I don't know when it happened exactly, but I re-registered msxml30.dll the backup has not had issues since.

The information store has crashed since that above fix, but I do believe the database is in a dirty state. I'll do a repair on it and see how it fares...

After that I'll re-create the one script that purges the Junk and Deleted items folders. Hopefully that'll resolve it.