How to Fix Exchange 2019 Slow Performance Issue?

Optimizing and maintaining an Exchange Server is a difficult task for any administrator. In most cases, the problem is slow performance of the server or some of the components. Below, we will discuss the factors that might impact the performance of Exchange Server and the possible ways to boost the server performance.

Storage Performance

Although you would have a good CPU cores and memory installed on the server or provisioned on your hypervisor, you still face performance issues on your Exchange Server. This might happen due to the throughput of your storage.

So, why this problem has occurred now? Well, at the time of provisioning the server, you cannot estimate the increase of load or growth of the company. You would have a Storage Area Network connected with Fiber-optic to the server nodes passing through a multipath using a Fiber-optic switch for redundancy. So, if you have installed slow disks, then you will surely face an issue with performance.

This is an example of the setup.

Let’s say, you have normal SATA drives with 6 GB/s speed, which is not enough. The option is to upgrade to at least 12GB/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives, which are double the speed. Solid State Drive (SSD) are fast, but they’re also expensive. In this case, you can consider splitting the data. You can store the databases on the SSD arrays and the log files on the SAS drives.

The choice of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is also important as it will affect the performance of disks. It is best to have separate data stores and sections in your SAN. This would mean less work for the array to manage. Different RAID levels offer different performance. For example, a RAID 5 array offer 4x more read speed, but no write speed gain, while RAID 10 array will give the same read speed as RAID 5, but with 2x more write speed. However, this depends on the hardware (if it supports these two methods).

Compute Power and Network

Although you have fast storage, you cannot expect to have the desired performance if the compute is not enough. It’s important that the CPU and memory are above the recommended specifications.

Apart from this, there is another bottleneck in the performance – slow network. You can discuss with your network team to understand the cause of slow network connectivity. Nowadays, a gigabit connection is a must. Other things on the network which could impact the performance of the Exchange Server are filter rule on the routers and speed limitation on the switches, like bandwidth throttling.

Mailbox Database Size and Migration Jobs

The performance of the server is not dependent only on the hardware and network. You need to also consider the configuration of mailbox databases. You can have multiple databases rather than having one database with all the mailboxes and resources in it. This will increase the performance and availability in case a drive is lost or becomes inaccessible. Splitting the data between heavy users will also improve server’s performance.

You may also experience performance issues during mailbox migrations. It is strongly recommended to migrate mailboxes in batches and start migration outside the office hours. You can analyze the performance during mailbox migrations using the AnalyzeMoveRequestStats.ps1 PowerShell script.

Alternatively, you can use an application, like Stellar Converter for EDB to migrate mailboxes and other data from an Exchange Server to another version without impacting the server performance. With this tool, you can open multiple EDB files with no size limit and export the EDB data directly to another mailbox database with minimal downtime and performance.

Maintenance Tasks

Maintenance tasks or scans could affect the performance of the server. These include antivirus scans, real-time scans, and backup tasks, running in normal office hours. These tasks could lock the Exchange Server files and also slow down the server performance.

Conclusion

As you have seen, there are many things that could limit the performance of an Exchange Server. You can follow the mentioned ways to improve the performance of your server. In case of migration, you can use EDB to PST converter software, like Stellar Converter for EDB that can migrate data with minimal impact on the server performance. You can also use this tool to migrate data from on-premises Exchange Server to Office 365.

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About The Author

Shelly Bhardwaj

I am a Product Consultant and is associated with Stellar Data Recovery from last 8 years. I write about the latest technology tips and provide custom solutions related to Exchange Server, Office 365, MS Outlook, and many other Email Clients & different flavors of OS Servers. Read More