This was recently sent to an Exchange list in regards to Entourage that may
be related since you are talking about POP/SMTP. I don't run POP3/SMTP
against my EX2003 server using OL2003 (like RPC/HTTP to much). If you are
seeing something similiar, I would turn on diagnostic logging in OL2003,
duplicate a few times and document the steps, and then contact Microsoft.
-----Original Message-----
From: (e-mail address removed)
[mailto:
[email protected]] On Behalf Of
(e-mail address removed)
Posted At: Thursday, December 16, 2004 4:06 PM
Posted To: swynk
Conversation: Entourage and Out of Control Transaction Logs
Subject: Entourage and Out of Control Transaction Logs
A serious issue with Entourage 2004 as an Exchange client has come to light
in our environment.
About two weeks ago our Exchange 2003 (SP1) server dismounted all of its
databases because it had run out of transaction log sequence numbers. We
went through the workaround described in article 830408
(
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;830408), and were
able to get the server running within three hours.
Over the next couple of days we opened a case with Microsoft and began
investigating the circumstances surrounding our problem. We were generating
transaction logs at the rate of about one thousand per hour. Given the
available sequence numbers, we would run out again within forty-five days.
After eliminating message loops and antivirus software as the possible
causes of the high rate of transactions, our engineer turned to Entourage.
Microsoft had recently dealt with a similar case:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jeremyk/archive/2004/11/11/255705.aspx
To summarize that case, they found that when an Entourage user attempts to
send a message that is larger than permitted in the Exchange environment
(Exchange System Manager -- Golbal Settings -- Message Delivery properties
-- Defaults tab), the message gets stuck in the Entourage Outbox. Entourage
is unable to handle the error returned by the Exchange server. The client
then attempts to send the message again, repeating this cycle ad infinitum.
To determine whether Entourage was the culprit, we decided to block
Entourage clients from communicating with the message stores. The quickest
way to prevent Entourage 2004 from talking to the server is to stop the
World Wide Web Publishing service. We needed a bit of lead time to notify
our one hundred Entourage users that they'd be without email for half an
hour, so we scheduled the outage for the next afternoon. In the mean time,
we did decided to remove all internal message size restrictions, per the
advice in the blog entry above. The next morning, our log file creation
rate had dropped to about two hundred per hour. Later that afternoon we
stopped the w3svc for twenty minutes, and our log production rate was cut
almost in half -- forty-four logs produced in the twenty minutes preceding
the outage; twenty-four logs produced during the Entourage outage.
Even when it's not encountering an error while trying to send a message
larger than allowed, Entourage generates an unacceptably large amount of
transactions. At the current rate, our remaining sequence numbers will be
consumed within six months, so we're not out of the woods yet. Also, we've
reinstated a "receive" limit of ten megabytes to prevent large messages from
filling up a recipients mailbox. As there is not a "send" limit, this
appears to prevent the problem described in the blog entry.
The Entourage and/or Exchange product teams are supposedly working on a fix
for this problem. Whether it will only address Entourage's inability to
handle a message size error, or whether it will also address the
unacceptably high "chattiness" of the client remains to be seen.
More details:
Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 600 Mailboxes across 4 message
stores in one storage group 100 Entourage 2004 clients 500 Outlook (PC and
Mac) clients Began migration of Mac Outlook users to Entourage in mid-July
Transactions per second prior to removing message size limits in Exchange:
Average 94; Max 537 Transactions per second after removing message size
limit: Average 50 Transactions per second after stopping w3svc: Average 30
Log file production rate dropped from 1000 per hour to 72 per hour when
Entourage couldn't talk to the server. Go figure.
