Question : Server RPC Access Very Slow, Outlook stops responding

Good afternoon. I have a company where we put in a Exchange server at a main office.

Through this project we found very slow response when sending/receiving email.

The main office where this server is located has a business DSL line with 7MB down and 1MB up roughly.

Other branch offices connect to the mail server using RPC over HTTP but we AREN'T using Cached Mode.

When users click on emails they find that the Outlook 2003 client is slow to respond if it responds at all.

Office 1

DSL1 - Main Network  5MB down 512k up
DSL2 - Exchange Server 7MB down 768k up

Each has its own static IP address.


Office 2

DSL 1 - Main network 7MB down 768k up


Office 3

DSL 1 - Main network 1.5MB down 256k up



Office 4

DSL 1 - Main Network 3MB down 512k up



Office 5

DSL1 - Main Network 1.5 MB down  256k up



Would configuring each office with RPC over HTTP help out in Cached Exchange Mode or is running it not in Cached mode recommended for the slower connections?

I put the server in on a Friday and on Monday everything was slow or not responding so I turned cached exchange mode off.

We exmerged around 100GB of email from the locations up to the server from 80 users.

We use Exchange Enterprise 2003 and have 3 Message Stores.

2 sites per store with the exception of 1.

EAMS - Store 1
MOBP - Store 2
TH - Store 3

Any assistance is appreciated in finding out whether or not I should put in a bridgehead server, or if the issue here is something else in your estimation.


Server is ML350

Dual 3.2GHz Quad Core Xeons
(4) 73GB SAS drives
4GB of RAM (Well there is (2) 2GB DIMMS and (2) 512MB Dimms for a total of 5GB but the server reduced the available memory because we're not running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.

Answer : Server RPC Access Very Slow, Outlook stops responding

Any reason you aren't using cached mode?
That will be why access is slow - the mailbox is being accessed live to the Exchange server - nothing is stored locally. I find it slow when accessing just one mailbox live, let alone more than one. I would switch all mailboxes to cached mode first, see if that improves anything.

Your bottleneck is the upload speed at the main site. 1mb is not enough to run email live.
How many remote users? If you have more than about 20 remote then you need more upload bandwidth. Even with cached mode on it will be slow.

Simon.