Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

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Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:45:24 GMT

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re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

cnschindler — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:21:18 GMT

Very good article! Thanks for the information!

Christian Schindler(MCA-M)

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

jte369 — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:37:38 GMT

So do you recommend installing the KB938486 hotfix proactively on a Server 2003 computer running Exchange 2007 SP1 or only if this problem is observed?

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

mikelag — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:34:25 GMT

I would put this hotfix on proactively to prevent a faulty 3rd party driver from taking down your entire exchange server.

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

baldwinmathew — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:21:25 GMT

Great post. Do you know if this issues occurs on Windows 2008 w/ Exchange 2007 SP1?

Thanks.

-matt

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

mikelag — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:13:35 GMT

This hotfix has been rolled in to Windows 2008, so this problem should not occur there.

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

baldwinmathew — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:04:52 GMT

Sounds good. I'm eager to build out my Exchange 2007 + Windows 2008 platform and it's good to know I won't have to worry about this particular issue.

Thanks.

-matt

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

l.bernhart — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:19:27 GMT

We have a similar problem with SAP/Oracle running on Windows 2003 32 Bit (/3GB Option and PAE active).

4-5 times a day, the memory of every single process gets trimmed, the system is unresponsive for minutes.

For example, Mem Usage of Oracle crashes from 2 GB down to less than 100 MB.

This seeems to be a problem for each kind of database.

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

mikelag — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:03:08 GMT

I am not an SQL expert by any means, but if you are having working set trimming issues on your server, then I would go ahead and request the hotfix, install it, and see how it goes. http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2007/05/31/the-sql-server-working-set-message.aspx has more information on working set trimming problems and if you have GBs of RAM, this hotfix is definately going to help.

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

l.bernhart — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:33:22 GMT

There are several hotfixes, which solve problems with memory trimming.

But none of them helped us.

The problem has been solved with Service Pack 2 for Windows 2003.

We applied the SP one week ago, and since then this strange behaviour did nor occur again.

Thx for your interest.

Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

Infrastructure snapshots — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:44:49 GMT

Mike posted a fantastic explanation for an excessive paging problem that you might get on Exchange 2007

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

skipdog77 — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:07:25 GMT

Mike-

Applied this patch on all my servers (2003 SP2, Exchange 2007 SP1). Experienced an issue today where I couldn't login to the server via ILO or RDP.. Nothing. Had to hard power the server off as well. None of the services would really stop on the server, but mailbox access was working.. Weird..!

Server has only 60 mailboxes, running 8GB of ram. I'm curious as to why the PF Usage is 7.62 GB.. I checked the page file, and its set to only be 2048-4096 max. Maybe I dont understand the windows pagefile.. How is this possible, and is it harmful?

Skip

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

mikelag — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:54:21 GMT

It is normal for the pagefile to allocate a certain amount of memory for certain processes and has been a very common question here lately. The only time that there is cause for concern is when we the pages/sec increases on a server for an extended period of time possibly due to working set trimming going on. Online Defrag, Content Indexing, Streaming backups, etc. can cause an increase in memory usage on any given Exchange server, but that just makes sense due to the amount of work going on. If the memory consumed by the store process should get very high and the amount of available RAM gets low, then the Operating System could start trimming working sets if a process/driver should request memory to do work that the OS does not have available. This can cause the store process or all processes to get their working sets trimmed causing huge performance issues affecting your client connectivity.

See http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/08/06/449484.aspx for more information.

Weekend reading

subject: exchange — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 14:46:49 GMT

Five Microsoft Exchange Server backup worst practices Third-party Exchange Server 2007 backup and restore

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

bwl_tnb — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:42:38 GMT

I've applied all the fixes here and still getting issues with excessive paging.

8Gb RAM and currently 17.2Gb pagefile! What's weird is the pagefile is set to a min and max size of 12Gb.

The working set of the store process is flat as a pancake. The server looks like it's undergoing back pressure right now - I have app server owner complaining their mails are getting dropped by the exchange server.

The %Usage peak (_Total) for the Paging File counter is showing 100% utilisation.

The server only hosts around 200 mailboxes, this is pretty crazy.

They all use Enterpriuse Vault and we have around 16 Blackberry users.

Could really do with some pointers on where to go from here...

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

ndolgin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:50:51 GMT

Anyone know if this applies when E@k7 is installed on Windows Server 2008 DataCenter Edition?

How about the implicaiton of this environment also in on HyperV host?

re: Excessive paging on Exchange 2007 servers when working sets are trimmed

mikelag — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:11:11 GMT

This working set trim problem will occur on any Windows 2003/2008 server as well whether it be physical or in a VM.

Available memory should be monitored before it gets too low to trigger a working set trim. Windows 2008 does have some improvements in the Virtual Memory Manager to help with paging in some instances, but any application/driver behaving badly or requesting a large block of contiguous memory could cause a paging storm.