slowdowns and MAD monitoring thread

[dcrapanz]

I am having severe slowdowns on my outlook clients connecting to the
exchange server. At the same time I am noticing the following event
on the exchange server:

Event Type: Information
Event Source: MSExchangeSA
Event Category: Monitoring
Event ID: 9095
Date: 12/13/2003
Time: 2:14:05 PM
User: N/A
Computer: NS01
Description:
The MAD Monitoring thread is initializing.

and

Event Type: Information
Event Source: MSExchangeSA
Event Category: Monitoring
Event ID: 9096
Date: 12/13/2003
Time: 2:14:15 PM
User: N/A
Computer: NS01
Description:
The MAD Monitoring thread is initialized.

both events occur about every minute and i tend to think that they
are related with the slowdown i am seeing on the client. Eventually
my log file gets full after a day or so. I am not getting any other
error messages on the exchange server. i am runnig exchange 2000 or a
w2k box. Any help on how to solve this is appreciated. thks

 

[Guntha]

I'm having the same issue but my cleints are not slowing. I dont like the fact that these events happen so often.

Does anyone know anything on this?

Thanks
G

 

[xmsre]

Slowdowns that clients feel typically center around spindle contention on the log drive. Try the perfmon counter database - log record stalls per second. If the nomber is not very close to zero, or you have spikes that last several seconds or more, this is your issue.

The mad monitoring threads starting every minute or so could be related to changes in the link state routing. You could play with winroute to find out how often changes are occuring and track down why, or even take a userdump of store and take a peek at the state of the threads.

 

[ntwrkadmn]

I've looked into this problem for about a week now and here's what I learned so far. MAD.exe is used to tell store.exe to let go of the amount of memory it's using, when this fails to happen store.exe (runs information store) uses more and more memory until the server doesn't have anough resources to run and the server needs restarting. Check your service packs, the following article explains the problem.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q322125

This site is usefule too:

http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020466,2121738-2,00.htm

 

[xmsre]

If that were the case, I'd follow through with the questions "What process other than exchange running on the box is trying to allocate memory?" and "What would prevent exchange from dynamically releasing the memory?". It is inportant to be at the latest sp, and in this case I would recommend SP3 and the post sp3 rollup. If you're still having issues, you might want to look at ways of limiting the exchange IS cache size, or fragmentation within the cache. Many times, it still comes down to a poorly designed or configured storage subsystem vs. the load placed upon it. Exchange cannot release a dirty page, ie. a page containing changes, until that page is written to disk.