Internal Mail Delivery SLOW

[willrsmith]

We have 50 users on a single installation of Exchange 2000 Service Pack 3 (has been serviced packed 3-4 times over the months). Its running on a fully patched Windows 2000 Server with 2x 1.1GHz processors and 1.7Gb of memory (RAM). The information store is located on a separate disk and the log files are setup currently for circular logging (about to change as we have backups working ok now) on the OS disk (not the same disk as the information store).

Email going out externally is fine and incoming appears to be ok too. However internally sent mail can take upto 30 mins to be delivered. This is not user specific, nor does it appear to be a email size issue as even >1k emails still suffer from this problem.

In outlook 2000, the mail goes out of the outbox fine, there is a 5-10 second delay before it shows as having been sent. Some people get the mail straight away some don't. It isn't user specific, it doesn't matter weather you are sending to a distribution list, a couple of people or three or four, it also doesn't appear to be a issue with the size of peoples mailboxes.

The server uses about 1.4GB of its ram, The information store is on a 36gb 10000rpm drive with a 128MB cache on the raid card (I have turned this on and off, with no noticeable effect). On the SMTP server an external DNS is set there. There is plenty of free space on all disks (gigs of it), the information store has be defragged, the network has no issues (100mbts switched). The server is a global catalogue and a DNS server with a replication of the Active directory.

The only thing that may be out of the norm is that we are using 2 intel cards with the intel aggregation software, so that we get an effective 200mb full duplex connection (basically it allocates a virtual IP address).

So basically internal mail is frequently, intermittently slow to be delivered......

Anyone experienced this or have any thoughts????

Thanks

will

 

[bobbytupper]

By internal mail do you mean mail delivered between two mailboxes on the same server, if so the network is out of the picture.

If I were to troubleshoot this I would firstly set up performance counters and have the server net message me on set threshoulds (cpu>50% for example) and see if the mail going slowly has any correlation.

hope this helps.

 

[willrsmith]

Yes, I do mean between two or more mailboxes. I have performed a few of the basic MS recommended performance counter measurements e.g Local delivery rate, RPC requests, Rpc operations, Processor (store) time, SMTP local queue length, messages delivered per sec, messages sent per sec...

and sadly all seems ok... nothing really jumped high.. I dont have a true baseline to measue it against though.

One thing I did forget to mention was that we have the latest version of Symantec Antivirus for Exchange and Server running with default settings on both, however I have excluded the server antivirus from scanning the databases and mailroot folders...

Perhaps the only way will be to run pretty much all of the perfomance counters on the server, I may also disabel the antivirus for a day and see what happens....

Any other thoughts?

 

[bobbytupper]

Yes I would definately tak the AV out of the equation.

 

[willrsmith]

I will try removing the AV for a day and see what happens.

However, just a note about processor usage... We have only ever hit a max of 30% total usage, so processor power isnt an issue either.

If there are any other ideas let me know, and I will update this in a day or so if not with what happened after disabling the antivirus.

Thanks for all your help so far!!!!