Ruling Out Third-Party or Support Applications

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Degraded Exchange 2003 performance can be caused by applications unrelated to Exchange, or applications that provide some support to, or build upon, Exchange. Generally, the following applications have a high impact on the performance of a server:

  • Antivirus applications

  • Backup utilities

  • Monitoring utilities

  • Remote access tools

By using the information in this section, you can verify where the network, CPU, or I/O utilization occurs. Identifying this utilization information enables you to rule out applications that are not-Exchange related. If the problem is Exchange-related, the effect should show up in the following Exchange processes:

  • Store.exe

  • Inetinfo.exe

  • Emsmta.exe

  • Mad.exe

  • Exmgmt.exe

  • W3wp.exe

If any excessive I/O, CPU, or network utilization comes from processes other than these Exchange processes, check to see if any known third-party issues could be causing the problem.

The following topics explain how to understand which process is contributing to the performance degradation.