MSExchangeTransport 17017

This article provides an explanation and possible resolutions for a specific Exchange event. If you don't find what you’re looking for here, try searching Exchange 2010 Help.

Details

Explanation

This Error event indicates that the Microsoft Exchange Transport service is under an abnormally heavy load. This event is logged when an escalating back pressure event causes the Microsoft Exchange Transport service to shut down.

The Back Pressure Monitoring Infrastructure is a system resource monitoring feature on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Transport servers. This system monitors resources used by the Microsoft Exchange Transport service during message processing. The back pressure feature monitors the following system resources:

• Available hard disk space on the drive on which the message queue database is stored.

• Available hard disk on the drive on which the message queue transaction logs are stored.

• The number of uncommitted message queue database transactions that exist in memory. These are known as Version Buckets.

• The memory that is used by the EdgeTransport.exe process.

• The memory that is used by all processes.

The back pressure feature uses the following three stages of resource usage to determine how much to restrict message processing:

• Normal: In this scenario, the resource is not overused. The Transport server accepts new connections and processes messages as expected.

• Medium: In this scenario, the resource is slightly overused. The Transport server applies back pressure in the following manner. The Transport server processes messages from senders in the authoritative domain. However, the server rejects new connections and messages from other sources.

• High: In this scenario, the resource is severely overused. The Transport server applies full back pressure in the following manner. All message processing stops and the server rejects all new connections and messages.

These actions allow Exchange to slow incoming messages and let it catch up with processing queued messages. During these activities, Exchange 2010 continues to use resource monitoring and corrective actions to gracefully recover from resource usage issues. If these actions do not successfully restore resource usage to typical levels, the Microsoft Exchange Transport service escalates the corrective actions until the resource usage issue is corrected. If the issue is not corrected, the Microsoft Exchange Transport service may shut down.

This issue may occur when one or more of the following conditions are true:

• Many uncommitted database transactions (Version Buckets) exist. This may be caused by virus-related issues, corrupted messages, queue database integrity issues, or hard disk drive-related issues such as performance or storage space issues.

• A large message size limit is configured in Exchange. For example, a message size of 100 MB can cause this issue.

For more information, see Understanding Back Pressure.

User Action

To troubleshoot this issue, do one or more of the following:

• Review the Application log and System log on your Exchange 2010 servers for related events. For example, events that occur immediately before and after this event may provide more information about the root cause of this error.

• Review the Operations Console in Operations Manager for detailed information about the cause of this problem. For more information, see the "Introduction" section in this article.

• If a file-level antivirus scanner is running, verify that antivirus exclusions are configured appropriately. For more information, see File-Level Antivirus Scanning on Exchange 2010.

• Examine the global message size limits in Exchange. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Start the Exchange Management Console, expand Organization Configuration, and then click Hub Transport.

  2. In the details pane, click the Global Settings tab, click Transport Settings, and then click Properties.

  3. On the General tab, review the transport limits. By default, the maximum message size is 10 MB.

  For more information, see Understanding Message Size Limits.

• To view individual message limits, follow these steps:

  1. In the Exchange Management Console, expand Recipient Configuration, and then click Mailbox.

  2. In the details pane, click a mailbox, and then click Properties.

  3. Click the Mail Flow Settings tab, click Message Size Restrictions, and then click Properties.

• Examine the System event log to determine whether any hard disk drive or subsystem issues exist which may cause the storage issue.

• Examine memory-related performance counters or memory-related logged events to determine whether the Microsoft Exchange Transport service experienced an out-of-memory condition.

• You may want to review the back pressure configuration settings on the server. This information is stored in the EdgeTransport.exe.config file. The file is located in the following folder on the Transport server:

  %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin

  Note   We recommend that you do not modify the back pressure settings.

  For more information about the back pressure settings, see the "Back Pressure Configuration Options in the EdgeTransport.exe.config File" section in Understanding Back Pressure.

• You may want to increase diagnostics logging to log the components in the transport pipeline. To increase diagnostics logging for the Transport components, follow these steps:

  1. In the Exchange Server 2010 Management Console, expand Server Configuration, and then click Hub Transport.

     Note   For an Edge Transport server, click Edge Transport.

  2. In the Actions pane, click Manage Diagnostic Logging Properties for the appropriate server.

  3. Expand MSExchangeTransport.

  4. Click the following components, and then click Expert, then click Configure for each component:

  • Smtpreceive

  • Smtpsend

  • DSN

  • Components

  • Remote Delivery

  • Categorizer

• Determine whether the transport database is corrupted. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Stop the Microsoft Exchange Transport service.

  2. Remove the transport database. To do this, rename the following folder:

     %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\TransportRoles\data\Queue

• Resolve your issue by using self-support options, assisted support options, and other resources. You can access these resources from the Exchange Server Solutions Center. From this page, click Self-Support Options in the navigation pane to use self-help options. Self-help options include searching the Microsoft Knowledge Base, posting a question at the Exchange Server forums, and other methods. Alternatively, in the navigation pane, you can click Assisted Support Options to contact a Microsoft support professional. Because your organization may have a specific procedure for directly contacting Microsoft Product Support Services, be sure to review your organization's guidelines first.

For more information about the transport pipeline in Exchange 2010, see Understanding Transport Pipeline and also the Exchange Server Team blog article,

Exchange 2010 Transport Architecture Diagrams Available for Download.

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