Slow opening mail in OWA 2003

[RISHIDSHAH]

I have a problem with OWA. My setup is as follows:

One front-end Exchange 2003 on Windows 2003 Server
One back-end Exchange 2000 SP3 on Wibdows 2000 SP4.

Both servers are on a gigabyte lan and the back-end server serves approximately 100 cleints. Currently the frot is still Our database is just 8Gb is size.

The OWA is configured to use SSL and i have created a certificate by putting certificate services on one of our domain controllers. The problem is whether i try OWA from inside my LAN or from outside through the firewall, when i click on a message to open it it takes about 15 seconds for the mail to open and be shown.


This happens inside the LAN or from outside so its not a bandwidth issue.

From within the lan the SSL certificate is recognised as being issued by a trusted authority (our DC) but still the 15 second delay so again i think it might not be the SSL but i could be wrong.

Any Advise.

Thanks,

Rishi

 

[jurgen]

Dit you set the compression to high ?

 

[pschwarz]

One of our users have difficulty with OWA loading her mail box, while others are fine. Could be the 6,600 items of mail in her main inbox. I have encourage her to move them to sub folders, but she has yet to.

 

[xmsre]

There's a 2003 whitepaper called "The effects of Mailbox size on Exchange Server performance"

Might be worth a glance.

 

[RISHIDSHAH]

I had enabled high compression and in the basic client the time to open mail was 5 seconds and 15 seconds in the full cleint. Problem is my people like the full client. Most of our users are below 300Mb mailbox size size. There are just 3 to 4 people who ate around 800Mb.

However its not just the users, even if i create a test account with just a handful of mail i still get this problem.

Our backend mail server is a Dual 3GHz Xeon with 4Gb of RAM, running Exchange Enterprise. The Database is on a raid 10, the OS on a seperate Raid 1 and the transaction logs on a seperate raid 1. Thus the backend is quite high spec.

I had this problem with frontend owa on owa2000 also and though the 2003 might make it better. Havig said that the basic client definately makes it better, i just want to find a way of making the front end better.

Rishi