STORE.EXE Memory Utilization

[pbarman]

Unity 3.1.4 on Exchange 5.5 SP4 has a store.exe process taking 880MB memory. It was certainly not using this much memory, but the memory utilization seemed to have increased these days. I have seen in other post which says it is normal. Since the memory utilization is increasing am a little worried. Yesterday we restarted the store.exe process, and this morning the utilization jumped to 880MB again.

Any suggestions?

[kechambe]

Check out:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;182505

The store is designed to grab as much physical memory as available and then it will give it back to other apps as needed. What you are seeing sounds normal to me.

If you want you can run the Exchange 5.5 Performance Optimizer and limit the amount of memory it can use but I would really caution against it. Unless the machine is going into swap it is just using the hardware efficiently.

Thanks,

Keith

[pbarman]

Thanks for your reply. It hasn't yet gone into swap. It is using 97% physical memory, so it may go into it soon. The machine has 2GB physical RAM.

What could be our problems if we run Exchange 5.5 Performance Optimizer?

Thanks,

Partha

[kechambe]

I really wouldn't run it. That type of memory usage is exactly how it is designed to work and doesn't concern me at all. Limiting the memory the the Store can use will force it to cache less causing higher CPU usage and disk access. It would end up working against you by degrade performace overall. So again, I wouldn't touch it.

Thanks,

Keith

[pbarman]

Thanks very much!!

[pbarman]

Keith,

One question, what if the memory utilization touches the swap file? What should we do at that point?

Thanks,

Partha

[pbarman]

Keith,

The memory utilization went from 95% last week, to 99% today. I see it will touch the swap file soon. Can you suggest how to prevent that, or what would be best to do at this point?

Thanks,

Partha

[kechambe]

Until it actually starts to swap Exchange is still working as designed. I would not make any changes to the system.

If at some point it does start to swap Unity isn't going to grind to a halt or anything like that. It will continue to run fine so you aren’t going to experience any downtime because of this.

Only when it goes it to swap would I take action to restrict the amount of memory available to the store. By again, it appears to still be working correctly from the data you have provided. At this point I would recommend that you continue monitoring a refrain from making any changes.

Thanks,

Keith