Mailbox Size Impact

[dpvone]

This may be a better question to ask in an Outlook/EMail Client forum, but I thought I'd start here. I manage the Exchange serever for a small company (currently 187 Users). I have been specifically instructed to impose no limits on the executives' mailboxes. As you may imagine I now have 5 mailboxes which are >2GB, the largest being 6.3GB.

The two biggest offenders are constantly complaining that their email is very slow and occasionally locks up. Does anyone have any data on the impact of having such a big individual mailbox or any white papers which would outline this? I think it has a huge impact on performance on the client but will need to quantify this.

I'll be doing some searches myself and will post links if anyone is interested.

Thanks,
DPVONE

 

[Koonan]

It really doesn't matter how big the mailbox is, when you are talking about MB or GB. What really slows things down is the number items/emails in a given folder, like the Inbox. They is a big difference in "performance" when you are talking about 100 messages in your mailbox, as apposed to 5000. When Outlook connects to a given folder, it queries the email header for each message. The more you have in a given the longer it takes. We first saw this with some of our Public Folders. Then some of our users started to complain. Once we got the number of messages under a 1000 it was reasonable.

 

[58sniper]

Koonan is right. Key folders like Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, etc all have performance issues when the number of items in them gets high.

Also, what's you distaster recovery plan for restoring mailboxes that big? Is there an SLA involved?

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)