Exchange 2010 store.exe service takes high memory utilization.

  • Article

We usually receive questions that Exchange service (store.exe) is using most of the memory on a mailbox server.

The behavior you see on the mailbox servers for store.exe is completely normal. This is in order to allocate as much data in memory address space as possible, so that each user experience great performance in their Outlook clients.

If another process should need the more memory, the Exchange store.exe process will released it as required. This is by design.

By default, the msExchESEParamCacheSizeMax key is not set, which means the store can allocate the memory it needs dynamically. ESE (store.exe) will grow the cache to consume almost all available RAM on the server if there is no other memory pressure on the system For example, if the server contains 16gb physical memory, if there is no other memory pressure, one could expect that the store.exe process will grow to use up to 14gb memory (16gb minus 2gb allocated to Kernel mode). This much larger database cache size results in greatly reduced disk I/O, and is preferred anyways, as reading information from memory is much faster than reading information from disk. If memory pressure occurs, as when other applications request/require memory, ESE will appropriately shrink the size of the database cache. It’s not recommended to modify the msExchESEParamCacheSizeMax attribute of the information store object. Lowering this value may degrade performance, in terms of server performance as well as in terms of end-user experience.

References:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832793.aspx
https://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/08/06/449484.aspx 
https://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/11/27/431644.aspx 
https://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/16/432222.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd346700.aspx
https://blogs.technet.com/b/mikelag/archive/2009/08/20/exchange-2007-memory-usage-and-helpful-troubleshooting-tips.aspx

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hello All - Any answers on this?

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2013
    4G installed, Exchange Store only uses 709M but total in use by the server is 3.46 or 86% Interesting thing is, there is only one user on the system now and I constantly receive messages that the exchange server is unavailable. Typical m$ b.s, the world of windows is about to come crumbling down since they're still using the same code over and over since windows 3.11. - same os (which it's not really an OS), different face

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2013
    I have this issues all the time with 2k8 SBS and 2k11 SBS, you need to set the data cap on exchange. You can have 32GB of ram and its going to do the same thing. GG Microsoft.

  • Anonymous
    August 27, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2013
    I have 128GB of RAM on my server. How do I make it use all of the RAM?  Right now, it is only using 4GB.  I want Exchange 2010 to use all my memory. Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2013
    One of our client's servers has exchange on it and it normally will use up 30.7 out of 32GB on the machine.

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2014
    Sorry to say but even though your article is just repeating what Microsoft says. The statement is not true. Not by you but my MS. store.exe do not release any memory to any other services. When store.exe grab that memory I never seeing let it go and I take care a total of 12 SBS. Performance is greatly affected by store taking that much memory. For example opening documents from a workstation, since there is no Word services running on the server the store don't release any memory but the users are badly affected by the performance when they try to work on word, excel or any other software that don't require a service running at the server level. I do edit the Cache in order to have a stable server.

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2014
    I am having the same issue with Exchange 2010 and SBS 2011. Memory being used by store.exe is 15.3 GB out of 16 GB. The server is constantly locking up. Can you explain how you are editing the cache size to 1 GB and 4 GB. Thank you

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2014
    This link shows you how to change the max RAM cache size for exchange 2011 (also works for SBS 2011): http://eightwone.com/2010/03/25/limiting-exchange-2010-database-cache/?like=1&_wpnonce=b4c8db312c

    This one is how exchange 2010 uses its RAM for Mailboxes : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832793.aspx

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2014
    Exchange 2010*

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2014
    I have a problem can't capture Netmon due to this, the netmon running keeps stopping while system out of memory.
    Any idea?

  • Anonymous
    October 10, 2014
    Im running SBS 2014 and the server is locking up and i seams to be a problem when Windows SBS Console is open.
    When closing Windows SBS Console everything is ok again.