Requesting data from microsoft exchange

[kugrad]

Hello,

We have several users on our local LAN that are having difficulties with Microsoft Exchange 5.5 SP4. The clients are running Windows XP Pro with Office XP. We have one user in particular that had the most difficulties. It will take him 5-10 minutes to delete one email the whole time the box saying 'Requesting Data from Microsoft Exchange' is present.

I have changed our network card from a 10/100/1000 to just a 10/100. I have deleted the users mailboxes and recreated them. I have removed the anti-virus software and none of these helped.

Any suggestions would be great, I have read all the posts regarding the threads relating to this. I thought I would start another to try to get some fresh ideas.

Thank you for your time,

Joe

 

[dodgygeezer]

Has your troublesome user tried this from another computer?

If the problem is only being experienced on one or two computers then it's quite likely the problem is on their machines and not the server.

 

[kugrad]

I tried on another PC with close to the same configuration as his computer. These are Windows XP SP1 PC's with Office XP SP2 installed. I received the same error message of trying to contact the exchange server.

Any other ideas?

 

[dodgygeezer]

Are you sure this same problem isn't happening to your other users? I have seen this problem before however this slow-down happened for everyone. I guess it's more noticeable on XP because of the 'Requesting Data' box.

Maybe your troublesome user could try this on a none XP machine, I guess you might still get a slow response.

Alternatively your XP machines might be suffering with slow TCP/IP performance so you might also want to test the performance of other apps compared to other OS's on the network.

 

[kugrad]

This does happen from time to time on all machines but this one is every time and it is exremely painful. This is one of the head guys of the company so he is anxious to get this fixed. We only have 512MB of RAM in our server, could that be the problem, we have about 150 user mailboxes that do tons of email all day long.

How do I correct the slow TCP/IP performance? I have not noticed it on my machine but I also have Office 2003 Beta running.

 

[dodgygeezer]

It does sound like your server is rather under-powered

As to why one user is getting hit more than others, I'm not sure. I would guess that the user probably has more mail than anyone else and probably has most of it stored in their Inbox folder. This could mean that the server gets pummeled every time he opens his mailbox loading from disk into memory.

I'm not much of an XP expert although someone round here might be. You might want to post about this problem in the XP forum.

 

[kugrad]

Funny part is I have deleted his mailbox twice and recreated it. The second time I did not import any old email back in, I left it clean. I thought his email kept getting corrupt. It will run great for a day or so and then back to the requesting data from microsoft exchange.

 

[CCFAdmin]

Hey guys...

I'm coming into this a bit late... but I'm having similar experiences.

Has any investigated the possibilty of virus scanning software, ie. group shield built for M exchange.

Thanks

 

[kugrad]

Hey camy2079

I am still looking for an answer to this problem. No good solutions yet. We are thinking about upgrading to Exchange 2000 to hopefully solve the problem.

 

[BruceB7]

I have seen similar problems, in various mixed environments.

I think that the problem is with XP, have not been able to narrow it down to OS or Office App, but from what I have seen XP has various issues like this.

kugrad, I dont think it is a problem with your server, however you should have more RAM for that client base.

Try downgrading your users Office App to Office 2000, see if that makes a difference, if not try his OS as Windows 2000 pro, with Office XP, then with Office 2000 if that does not work.

What OS is your Server Running?

From what I have seen, XP pro tends not to work so good on a network until it has been tweaked, and thus I am not a big fan of it. Try the above and see if it tells you anyting, if not, at least you can rule the OS and Office version out.

Good Luck

 

[jabhawk]

I have the same issue with all of our users. We run XP, and 2000 desktops with Office 2000. We started to see this after installing Symantec NAV for Exchange 5.5.

THe NAV scan seems to the issue for us. The server is a old Compaq with 512M installed (single PII).

Jonthan A Black

 

[rdroske]

AV software is definitely one of the most likely causes of this. With CA this will happen until entire store is scanned once and background scanning is left on.

Also possible that offline folders are corrupt if laptop user.

 

[DanIT]

This may sound dumb, but is the drive compressed that Exchange is sitting on? Someone built one of our servers like that, and it caused painful slowdowns.

Exchange should never be on a compressed drive.

Dan

 

[RichardMoran]

I had the same messages coming up with XP, but that was entirely due to an old underpowered Exchange server.

Whenever we got the 'requesting data..' message, we could see on the server that the CPU was maxing out running the STORE.EXE process.

Can you confirm that you don't have performance issues on the server when this event occurs? If you don't then we can rule out disk/memory/CPU issues, and look to alternate solutions.

I run Symantec NAV for Exchange 5.5 on our new server and have no issues with 'requesting data...', although I have read some documents recently that suggest a possible problem for some users.

It would be nice to rule out performance issues.

Rik

 

[NewJack73]

I've had that same problem, its caused by the NAV software. Go to Norton Antivirus for Microsoft Exchange, then go to auto protect and change the Exchange client retry delay to 500.

 

[Wadoki]

Again I am another user with the same problem. Before you upgrade the version or the hardware, have you simply tried to run the eseutil to defrag your system. Once I did this I haven't had a single complaint.

 

[jabhawk]

FYI. I posted earlier stating that we had the same issues. Since then we installed 2 SCSI 9G drives and moved the private and public stores to each. Also we installed the 1G memory upgrade.

Just with these two changes we see a signifigant improvement in performance. I have not yet optimized the drives nor attempted any Raid setup as yet.

I would suggest that any setup with similar delays try the server upgrade based approach before making any major changes.

This only cost us $400 in spare parts and I see a 200% ROI just from the reduced user complaints. May even try the dual processor upgrade for another $150. Overall ceaper than a total server replacement or client reconfigurtion.

Specs
Compaq Proliant 1600R/450 PII / Exchange 5.5 on NT 4.0
(original 512m, 10G SCSI (system,private,public))
(current 1G, 10G SCSI-system, 9G SCSI-private, 9G SCSI-public)
wait time for message with 512k attachment was 4-5+sec.
wait time now 1-2sec.
(based on 10 user load with 100 speed network)

JAB

Jonthan A Black

 

[zbnet]

Exchange particularly likes multiple processors, as it is heavily optimised for multithreading. So better to have 2 slower processors than 1 fast one. 2 fast ones are even better