Slow opening attachments

[jeehole]

We have a single Exchange 5.5 server, running on a windows 2000 box with dual Xeon 866 processors, and 1gb of RAM. It has about 200 mailboxes, and the priv.edb is currently 6.3gb.

Lately, the server has been reacting very slow when opening some attachments - even small ones (ie word doc less then 50k). It does not seem to be a network speed issue, as some large attachments will open fine, but then a smaller one may take 30 seconds to open. Usually the same attachments seem to be slow, though not always.

It seems to me like it is an index problem or something (having trouble finding the attachment in the database maybe?)

My databases are long overdue for some maintenance. I am planning to take them down and do a defrag at the very least.

What other maintenance/tests should I run? Should I also do some tests/fixes with ISINTEG? Its been a long time since I used that, which ones if so?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Joel

 

[rdroske]

Could also be an issue with your virus scanner. You wouldn't happen to be running CA would you?

 

[jeehole]

We are using Trend Micro ScanMail on the exchange server, and Trend OfficeScan on the clients. I tried disabling the client on my machine, and then some attachments still open very slowly. Were you thinking it could be a problem with the virus scan on the server end?

Thanks

 

[rdroske]

Yes. I had this problem when we switched form Norton to CA. We just had to give the server one overnight to get all of the existing attachments scanned and then enable background scanning and we have been OK since.

If you haven't changed anything recently it's probably not the problem but it may be worth turning off scanning at the server long enought to try one of the slow attachments, even if just to rule it out.

 

[jeehole]

Ok, I turned off the real time scan on the server, and then tested it - still very slow.

I'm testing it with <20k HTM files attached to emails.

I think there's something wrong with the database...

Thanks

 

[ohno2]

I'm having this problem as well.
Only it doesn't happen to all PCs, and the ones that it
does happen on work fine after "ANY" change to the configuration is made... for about an hour. Then they're back to taking over a minute to open office documents.

Any thoughts would be welcome.

 

[jeehole]

Ohno2,

I ended up discovering that it was a client problem. It only happened on machines running Outlook XP (2002). Check out this KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290025&Product=ol2002

Also, something else I discovered, since my problem was specifically HTML documents, I set the file associations so that windows prompts me to "save" or "open" when I access the HTML attachment. Doing this, and then clicking on the "open" option made a big difference