We currently have an issue where the perfmon object Memory\Pool non-paged bytes regularly exceeds 90MB - up to 125MB in some cases on a clustered Exchange solution we have. The 2 physical servers are Win2K SP4 with Exchange 2003 SP1 with 4GB RAM in each. We have set the /3GB switch in the boot.ini and also set the SystemPages value in the registry to 31000 and HeapDeCommitFreeBlockThreshold value set to 0x00040000. The problem still occurs though - I would like to test what happens if the /3GB switch is removed as I understand the setting of this switch may be detrimental in certain situations. Any thoughts on this ??
Hi there, Removing the 3GB switch will effectively double your NPP. from the 128mb it currently is upto 256mb. However it will cause bottlenecks elsewhere. Personally I would: 1. Add the EnableAggressiveMemoryUsage registry key (not sure if this is applicable to Win2k/IIS 5.0 though) to allow connections up to 120mb rather than the current 100mb it is set at. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934878 Note that the kb only mentions 2003 server and IIS6 2. Move users off to another backend to lower NPP whilst you investigate it more. You can use Poolmon and PoolsnapSVC to capture data to try and see what is causing your high NPP. I have noted in the past HP drivers for NICs are bloatware - also their teaming software. Moving to Intel NICs and drivers for example gained 18MB back from NPP usage. If you have any unused NICs in the server, disable them, most will consume anywhere from 512k to 6MB of NPP. You may find however you have nothing to gain back, and you are just at the limits of what your current EVS nodes can handle. I presume you are also running your server with a default VGA driver, this can claim a decent amount of NPP back. Compliment it with the /basevideo switch in the boot.ini - this yields a further 1MB of NPP. Oliver
Nick, I hope you must be knowing that Microsoft Does not support Exchange server 2003 version lower than SP2. There sould not be any problems in applying SP2 first. Talking about removal of /3GB switch, it wont affect on clustered servers significantly. I have seen memory problems happening due to /3GB switch but they were all for HTTP virtual server. I would recommned you to test it in your labs first. -- Milind Naphade http://mnaphade.blogspot.com "Nick" wrote: > > We currently have an issue where the perfmon object Memory\Pool non-paged > bytes regularly exceeds 90MB - up to 125MB in some cases on a clustered > Exchange solution we have. > > The 2 physical servers are Win2K SP4 with Exchange 2003 SP1 with 4GB RAM in > each. > > We have set the /3GB switch in the boot.ini and also set the SystemPages > value in the registry to 31000 and HeapDeCommitFreeBlockThreshold value set > to 0x00040000. > > The problem still occurs though - I would like to test what happens if the > /3GB switch is removed as I understand the setting of this switch may be > detrimental in certain situations. > > Any thoughts on this ?? > >
