Limiting Exchange 2010 SP1 Database Cache

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Michel de Rooij

Some time ago, I blogged about on how to limit the amount of memory Exchange 2010 can allocate for database cache. After the introduction of Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 this didn’t seem to work anymore, as many people reported.

After some investigation, it turns out you also need to set the msExchESEparamCacheSizeMin value for Exchange 2010 SP1’s cache manager to honor the minimum and maximum limits for allocating database cache memory.

To show you this, I’ll first show Exchange 2010 SP1 where I only set msExchESEparamCacheSizeMax. In this example, I’ll use a value of 1024 which corresponds to 32 MB (1024 * 32kb pages). I then turned on Performance Monitor and started monitoring the following MSExchange Database Cache\Information Store counters:

Database Cache Size, the current allocated database cache size;
Database Cache Size Min, the minimum database cache size;
Database Cache Size Max, the maximum database cache size.

After restarting the Information Store and putting on some load on the Exchange server, you will see that the allocated database cache (green line) rises above the configured maximum (blue line).

When you check the database cache minimum size (red line), you’ll see it contains a default value, which can be larger than the configured maximum. So apparently, Exchange 2010 SP1’s cache manager contains different logic compared to Exchange 2010 RTM when the (default) minimum value is larger than the configured maximum.

To get Exchange 2010 SP1 to honor the configured msExchESEparamCacheSizeMax value, we need to configure msExchESEparamCacheSizeMin as well. The location is identical, so consult the initial post on how to perform this step; where it reads msExchESEparamCacheSizeMax, use msExchESEparamCacheSizeMin as well.

When we configure a value of 256 for msExchESEparamCacheSizeMin (8 MB) we get the following result after restarting the information store:

As you can see, the reported database cache size now nicely flattens out around the 32MB line when under load. Notice that it may go over it a little bit once in a while, but that may have to do with allocating and releasing memory.

Now only one question remains: is this a fault in Exchange 2010 SP1 or expected behavior. At least, it’s different behavior when compared to earlier Exchange versions.

Note that the above information also applies to Small Business Server 2011 since SBS2011 includes Exchange 2010 SP1.

56 thoughts on “Limiting Exchange 2010 SP1 Database Cache”

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Chris Shipley on June 10, 2011 at 9:32 PM said:

Thank you very much for this article. I have just deployed Exchange in a single server scenario for a small office (less than 20 users) and was only using the 1 server for Active Directory and Exchange both. This helps me reserve some RAM for other tasks so they are not all taken up with by the Exchange store.

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ssstofffStof__ on July 19, 2011 at 9:22 AM said:

Thanks a lot. Now it works fine with settings this second variable too.
That store.exe is behaving very strange. After setting these variables (to a max of 4Gb) it is now not consuming more then 50Mb! Whilest, without the settings, it peaked quite immediat to 9GB.

Microsoft can explain what they want, but a process that consumes all the memory available … it sounds more like a huge memory leak, than a well managed process thread.

environment: SBS2011

all my best,
kristof

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- mdrooij on July 19, 2011 at 4:07 PM said:
  
  Allocating memory on-demand instead of preallocating takes longer and directly influences end user experience.
  
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  - Adam on January 23, 2012 at 11:24 PM said:
    
    It may take longer, but for a lot of users in small office environments it is really -just- email, and a few milliseconds to allocate some RAM doesn’t matter at all as long as the rest of the system is responsive.
    
    I just “fixed” a situation at a small dentist’s office with a box that has 8 hyperthreading Xeon cores and 16GB of RAM and very little software running on the server: It just does a little bit of email with Exchange, spools a few printers, stores a few files, and does some SQL stuff for their patient database.
    
    The machine was actively swapping and being unpredictably slow. Simple single-page print jobs would hang for nearly a minute before proceeding. Patient lookups would take 10 or 15 seconds.
    
    There are only two users that ever really use Exchange there. And to serve these two users, Exchange (or rather, store.exe) was using 9GB of RAM for itself!
    
    Now, sure, that’s by design. But it’s a bad design for a system that does more than handle email.
    
    After limiting the database cache and restarting the requisite service, and doing nothing else at all, the system was immediately more responsive. Printing became nearly instantaneous, as did database queries. In other words, it began acting like a fast, lightly-loaded server ought to.
    
    “Directly influences end user experience,” indeed.
    
    Anyhow, many thanks for the information. It was invaluable in troubleshooting this system today.
    
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EricE on August 7, 2011 at 3:22 PM said:

@mdrooij – MS and the Exchange team can say that all they want but I notice an extreme performance difference when Exchange is allowed to exhaust all available memory vs. when I throttle it with these parameters.

Maybe this is more pertinent to SBS 2011 than a machine dedicated to Exchange – but in the end it doesn’t matter – Exchange store consuming all the memory really kills the performance of my box!

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David on August 31, 2011 at 12:18 PM said:

I tried this min setting with value 256 on sbs 2011 exchange 2010 sp1. Store.exe does not go over 67MB. If i only have the max setting of 5GB it becomes 7GB in size, eating up all my RAM (same as without the max setting). Anyone solved this yet? I want the store.exe to be 5GB to have 2GB free space for other programs.

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Pete on September 14, 2011 at 12:55 PM said:

I’m using SBS 2011 Standard as an AD/File server only for 25 users… no Exchange in use… what’s the minimum I can set these parameters to before exchange becomes unstable to save memory since it’s not used at all (disabling the services is not recommended apparently), Thanks

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- mdrooij on September 14, 2011 at 1:22 PM said:
  
  If you’re using it for AD/FS, why did you go for SBS in the first place?
  
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  - Pete on September 14, 2011 at 1:33 PM said:
    
    I know its stupid but originally plan was to use SBS 2011 essentials but then we hit the user limit… so SBS 2011 std seemed good… will likely use the sharepoint/wsus etc… we only have one physical server (this a remote office in the americas so very hard to purchase server equipment) … don’t want to virtualize (raw IO speed important to the engineering apps we use, local tech support doesn’t understand virtualization) and can’t afford a proper SAN….. so SBS 2011 STD seemed the way to go….
    
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- Billy Nguyen on February 23, 2012 at 3:39 AM said:
  
  Restart your server, check store.exe memory consumption, use that value as your min.
  
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Bob Simons on September 16, 2011 at 4:47 AM said:

I still dont understand how to set the msExchESEparamCacheSizeMin variable. To limit the msExchESEparamCacheSizeMax setting to 12 gigs, it appears I’d triple the example you gave, or set it to 393216. Waht do I set the Min variable to on 2010 sp1?

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apr on September 19, 2011 at 11:59 AM said:

NOT works (sbs 2011). Same as ssstofffStof and David.

Setting to 4Gb max, and 8 Mb min yields ~50Mb for store.exe and never exeeds it.

Why?

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Bob Simons on September 19, 2011 at 1:18 PM said:

I set the max to to 393216 and min to 2560 and it stays around 265 megs. I wanted to limit it to about 12 gigs.

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apr on September 20, 2011 at 8:29 AM said:

Ok works. After one day store.exe running with ~4Gb memory.

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Bob Simons on September 27, 2011 at 2:28 AM said:

I’m finding that this has noi effect on 2010 SP1 Rollup 5. Dell tech support did some testing and found that it did not work for them with Rollup 4v2 or 5, which supports my results.

With the changes in, with either 8 or 80 megs min, nd 12 gigs max, it never went above about 265 megs. I rolled out the changes and on a 32 gig 2011 SBS machine, it is now about 19.2 gigs for the IS, with about 700 megs free. Does anyone know how to make this work on a Rollup 5 machine?

Can anyone contradict this and say it worked for them on a rollup 4v2 or 5 machine? There is a BES Express 5.03 machine on a diffferent server in this envorinment.I think the memory issue related to BES which was allegedly fixed in Ru3 is still not fixed…

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- Bob Lenz on October 7, 2011 at 5:13 PM said:
  
  I am experiencing something similar. I’m on 4v2 Rollup right now. I set the min at 2 GB and the max at 25 GB. It hasn’t gotten over 2.5 GB in 48 hours. So far, I haven’t noticed performance issues (350 + users), but I am thinking I am going to go back to clearing the values at this point to ensure performance for the information store.
  
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  - Bob Simons on October 8, 2011 at 3:20 PM said:
    
    Six questions: (1) single or multiple roles; (2) how much RAM, (3) have you tried more than one MIN setting; and (4) if so, what were the results? (5) Do you have a condition where the store size quickly runs up to the top of does it appear to be legit use or a memory leak? And (6) if it does max out, does it ever go back down significantly on its own?
    
    I have only 8 users but 3 with mailboxes from 6 to 12 gigs on an SBS 201i box with 32 gigs. So according to the chart for a multiple role box, it’ll try to take 20 gigs and I find that to be true but it never quite gets there, maxing out at about 19.3 gigs or so. I’m thinking I should try to limit the cache to so the rest of the system has a few gigs of memory to play with. So I then might have to set min and max the same.
    
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Mathias Jäkel on January 21, 2012 at 6:03 PM said:

Hello 821,

the same phenomenon exists by exchange 2010 sp2 systems. The msExchESEparamCacheSizeMax needs msExchESEparamCacheSizeMin to make it work.

Bye Mathias

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- Bob Simons on January 22, 2012 at 2:53 PM said:
  
  The issue I’m seeing on my SBS 2011 system is twofold: if I make any change to the min size, the store opens at around 65 megs and stays there. If I don’t change the settings, the cache will go to just under 20 gigs within 24 hours. Usually, it stays put for abourt 12 hours and then starts marching upwards until there is about 500 megs free on the 32 gig server, with an IS of about 19,300 megs.
  
  If I disble BES Express 5 (any version, doesn’t seem to matter but it’s at 5.0.3 MR1) Exchange behaves normally. So it seems to come down to (a) get rid of BES; or (b) have a broken server.
  
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Fred on February 3, 2012 at 9:48 PM said:

having difficulty finding the performance counters
“Performance Monitor and started monitoring the following MSExchange Database Cache\Information Store counters”
i see MSExchange Database\Database Cache Size, but not the ones seen in the article

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- mdrooij on February 5, 2012 at 11:48 AM said:
  
  MSExchange Database > Database Cache Size, Database Cache Size Min and Database Cache Size Max
  
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  - Paul W on February 17, 2012 at 5:01 PM said:
    
    Under SP1 and SP2 the values MIN and MAX are not available. Only Database Cache Size Resident and Effective.
    Maybe new values?
    
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brianlg on April 11, 2012 at 11:45 PM said:

Great article!!!… very useful!

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Abraham Sani on April 14, 2012 at 11:36 AM said:

After one week of battling, it has finaly worked. I was recieving all kind of answers, some say my AD is not functioning well, some say I have done missmatch setting in AD. but the problem was simple, my mail sever is out of memory, so what is comsuming the memory? how to alocate a memeory size to the application consuming all the memory? until I felt on this thread and compare it to other thread now I vote it 100% solution to this problem. this http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691304%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx is very important concerning Max alocation size. Thank you all, my exchange server is runing like a jet plan.

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SAM on April 16, 2012 at 12:29 PM said:

Hi This, method works for me for a short time then store.exe memory usage went up to 10Gb though I have set it to 7GB, any idea?

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Jeff Black on April 16, 2012 at 9:54 PM said:

I had been searching the net for a while and came across this post. I found it very informative and useful. My server is running much more efficiently now that I have better control over this. Thanks for a great post!

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Florian on July 29, 2012 at 10:04 AM said:

Hi, in my side the memory comming hight several mounth after installation (SBS2011 std).
Why at the begining I has any problem and soudenly I have this problem (store take one day to use all memory).
After an update ? maybe ? I don’t like when there is non explication of this kind of event.
Thanks in advance

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Stephen White on August 6, 2012 at 12:30 AM said:

I have an Exchange 2010 box which normally consumes a full 20GB of RAM, and I find that this behavior chokes some other services I have running on the box and makes the whole thing go very sluggish.

I’ve decided to restrict it to 16GB, so I’ve used 256 for msExchESEParamCacheSizeMin and 524288 for msExchESEParamCacheSizeMax. However after 3 full days it now only uses a bit more than 1GB RAM.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour? Does anyone know what might be causing it?

Thanks, Steve.

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- mdrooij on August 7, 2012 at 1:19 PM said:
  
  What is the problem? Exchange not eating up everyting?
  
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Tomislav on September 19, 2012 at 7:33 AM said:

Hi!

This fix works exactly as it should. To check if it works for you, go to perfmon and add a counter MSExchange Database\Database Cache Size (MB) for Information Store instance. You pick an instance after selecting the aforementioned counter.
If you limit it to 4 GB, it should max out at 4.000.001 (as is in my case) in perfmon.

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mrceolla on October 23, 2012 at 2:06 AM said:

After applying this ‘fix’, my store.exe will not rise to the specified Max, as others have reported here. Is there a reason/solution for this?

I have set a min of 256 (8MB) and a max of 65536 (2GB) for my Exchange 2010 on SBS 2011. Store.exe has not gone over 50MB. ???

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- Brian on November 28, 2012 at 4:28 PM said:
  
  After a few weeks of testing different settings on an Exchange 2010 SP2 box running on SBS 2011 Standard I found that it never rose much higher than the
  Database Cache Size Min and would only “Spike” towards the max…. With 32 Gigs of Ram I was getting warning that the services on the machine were out of memory. I reduced the min to 14gb and the Max to 16gb and the store has been happy at 14.5GB now for over a week.. Hope this helps….
  
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jasonwbcoxJason on December 14, 2012 at 3:23 PM said:

hi, Just done this for a customer using SBS2011 and so far so good. Before it would use all avalible memory but now it seems to only be using what was set.

Thanks for the tip.

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Avi Krief on January 23, 2013 at 6:56 PM said:

I have the same exact problem with SBS 2011 with 16 GB of memory, all memory is “eaten” by SBS exchange processes , reading this article is very helpful however, I can’t find the “msExchESEParamCacheSizeMax” or any of the other objects that need to be configured, can anybody help? screenshots?

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- Michel de Rooij on January 23, 2013 at 8:46 PM said:
  
  I refered to the pre-SP1 blog which contains information on how/where to set this
  
  Limiting Exchange 2010 Database Cache
  
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  - Avi Krief on January 23, 2013 at 10:12 PM said:
    
    The path was not correct, I had to play with it until I found the right OU, once I found it, it was easy fix (Ilimit the Max to 4 GB and the Min to 1GB), the Ram is using 8MB instead of the whole 16MG, The server can breath now, thank you for your posting was very helpful, I hope Microsoft will do something about this.
    Thank You
    AK
    
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Chris.K on July 15, 2013 at 8:18 AM said:

Just note that these settings got wiped out when I installed SP3 on my Exchange 2010 SP2 installs. Grr.

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Dan on October 28, 2015 at 12:52 PM said:

Thank you for this post
But how do you add msExchESEparamCacheSizeMin and msExchESEparamCacheSizeMax to perfmon ?
I have not found them…
Can you show me please ?

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- Michel de Rooij on October 29, 2015 at 7:27 AM said:
  
  Those are AD attributes, see the original article here: https://eightwone.com/2010/03/25/limiting-exchange-2010-database-cache
  
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Miles on January 30, 2017 at 4:48 PM said:

ok I have added the msExchESEParamCacheSizeMin = 32768 (1GB) and msExchESEParamCacheSizeMax = 327680 (10GB) on 2 of my clients servers (running SBS 2011 / Exchange 2010) but this has been ignored and store.exe on both servers back up to 20GB within 24 hours (after restarting store service)… trying to run perfmon with the entries as you have above but I only have database cache size I don’t have the other 2 values.. i’m looking in Perfmon > add counters then looking in MSExchange Database but they aren’t in there, where did you find them?? and any ideas why this isn’t this working in the 2 servers that I have set it up on?

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sean wright on April 12, 2017 at 4:28 AM said:

I have the same problem as Miles. I cannot add the max and min values to the counter.
Trying to resolve the same issue in SBS2011 Exchange SP1 Update Rollup 8.

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MarcR on January 7, 2020 at 1:58 AM said:

For Exchange Server 2010, memory never exceeds minimum setting, regardless of max setting. This is a bug. BOTH Min and Max MUST be set to the SAME value or it just won’t work.

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