Information Store

[jmorr34]

My Information Store is growing every day. I thought there was "white space" or something available inbetween the total size of the IS and the actual data?? What could be causing it to grow every single day? If I can users to clean up their boxes, it will not shrink the IS but keep it from growing any bigger for the mean time correct?

Anything I can do to actaully shrink down the IS??

Please help.

 

[KRPGroup]

Are you using Mailbox quotas for you users?

 

[jmorr34]

I do not believe so.....most people have a reasonable size box except for a few outliers.

 

[jmorr34]

anyone....ideas?

 

[KRPGroup]

When you say it is growing, by how much a day?

What are you using to monitor the growth? I am assuming you are refering to the actual priv1.edb and stm files or are you looking at the Exchsrvr folders?

 

[jmorr34]

it is not growing too much a day, but since july it has almost grown 2 gigs.

I am measuring by the size of the d: in which the IS is on and also by the size of the IS daily backup.

 

[zbnet]

White space is created when mail is deleted in your store. Mail is only finally deleted from the store when everyone who had a 'copy' of it (actually a pointer to the item) 'deletes' it; and when your Deleted Item Retention timer expires the item finally.

White space can be used again by the store to save new messages. So, if the average amount of new mail being created is higher than the average amount of messages being deleted, the trend will be for all white space that is created to be immediately reused, and still the size of the file will need to grow to store the new messages.

Your question really is: is all my growth caused by legitimate message traffic, or do I have some kind of mail loop that is consuming space? I would think that some kind of mail loop would confume space much faster than 1GB per month, therefore it's probably down to the accumulation of ordinary email.

You don't say how many users you have, nor what kind of users they are (light, medium, heavy users of email). So it's hard to make a judgement from here.

 

[KRPGroup]

You should search for a program called SpaceMonger, v1.4 is free and no install is needed. It is a great little utility that will visually tell you what is using up space on your partition. You can zoom in and out on your folder system and it gives you quick info by the mouse overs.

With is app you can confirm if it is your actual stores or if is log files or something else by comparing different days/weeks scans.

 

[58sniper]

To look for white space, find the event 1221 entries in your application event log. Those will tell you how much white space is in the databases (there is one 1221 for each database).

The fact that a mailbox store has grown by 2GB since July means absolutely nothing without telling us how many users you have, what their mailbox limits are, how much mail your organization gets per day...... 2GB is nothing. I can show you stores that grow by that much in a week.

As zbnet mentions, your DIRT setting will also impact the size of the database and when data will be removed from it.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP

 

[DanMIS]

Another possibility is that it may be logs. I didn't see where you say your logs are, but Exchange can be configured to save backup logs until a successful backup. If your backups don't complete successfully, the logs stay.

CCA Citrix 4.0
MCSA: Messaging 2003