Exchange 2013: The devourer of RAM!

[Gatt]

Well Exchange 2013 lasted less than 12 hours here,

It just wants RAM!! - no matter how much I give it, it uses it all up and demands more!

When it doesn't get more it throws a temper tantrum and grinds not only itself to a halt but the entire Hyper-V environment!

 

Grr...

[MatthewL]

How much RAM have you given it? It says 8GB minimum having a quick read online.

[featured_spectre]

One machine I had for Exchange 2010, ate 64GB RAM and demanded more. It is one of the biggest resource hogs known to man!

[Gatt]

It was an 10GB when I gave up!

[SYNACK]

I thought it was supposed to be less RAM hungry than 2010 too. Our 2010 manages on 8GB, only a hundred or so users though.

[Arthur]

Exchange is meant to use up all of your RAM (just like SQL Server).

[DMcCoy]

Yet exchange 2003 was happy with a single server and 2GB

[Netwacky87]

Exchange is meant to use up all of your RAM (just like SQL Server).

 

Yeah, I've noticed that however much RAM you have, exchange will just eat it.

[synaesthesia]

There's a bloody good reason why we avoid Exchange like the plague! 4GB on a (fairly crowded) VM and Zimbra doesn't even touch the sides! 2k accounts.

[Norphy]

RAM is there to be used. What's the point in putting 64gb of RAM in a server if the majority is going to be unused?

[ascott2]

As Arthur points out exchange will use all available RAM just like SQL. This is to relieve the requirements on disk speeds to enable virtualization. If you don't give fixed RAM allocation Hyper-V will over subscribe and bring down the whole box. Dynamic RAM is not supported with exchange for this reason.

[featured_spectre]

RAM is there to be used. What's the point in putting 64gb of RAM in a server if the majority is going to be unused?

 

We were meant to be having Exchange Server on 1 physical server with Sharepoint also. Sharepoint ended up going on another server.

[SYNACK]

Exchange is meant to use up all of your RAM (just like SQL Server).

 

Yea which is fine but it should also be able to live within its means. Ours does but it sounds like the ops install did not.

[Gatt]

I know that exchange and SQL and such systems all want decent specs, but MST of those systems run just fine in were specs such as my lab.

I mean, sccm 2012 wants way more than it currently gets but runs absolutely fine with 3GB and SQL runs fine with 4GB so expected exchange to do the same... but to max out 4GB right up to 10GB was just ridiculous..... 100% ram every time.....

[nickbro]

It's how exchange works, it will attempt to load as much data as it can into RAM to avoid HDD IO calls, even with an SSD RAM is quicker

[EduTech]

I have Exchange 2013 running in a lab environment and it seems to cope okay without any problems, if anything it's my disk speed which causes it headache! If I were to have my SSD back it would be fine! :-)

 

Lab Only ofcourse! not production!

 

James.

[Tsonga]

If you are unhappy with how much it is eating, limit it, just like you can with SQL.

[Gatt]

@Tsonga - how do you limit the RAM then? if it can be reduced then I'm game to try it again...

[Tsonga]

@Tsonga - how do you limit the RAM then? if it can be reduced then I'm game to try it again...

 

The link posted earlier shows how to do it in exchange 2010, I would assume there is an equivalent for 2013.

 

HOWEVER THIS IS WORST PRACTICE.

 

Like others have said, Exchange is designed to eat all the RAM. Personally I would only start limiting in a lab and never in a lab environment. When you do go live, give it it's own physical box, it doesn't like sharing.

[Michael]

An alternative is Office 365. Let Microsoft do all the hosting/managing and you just concentrate helping users. Each user gets 25GB by default and Exchange 2013 features will be available in the next few months apparently.

[EduTech]

An alternative is Office 365. Let Microsoft do all the hosting/managing and you just concentrate helping users. Each user gets 25GB by default and Exchange 2013 features will be available in the next few months apparently.

 

Couple of weeks for new customers ;-)

[Gatt]

The link posted earlier shows how to do it in exchange 2010, I would assume there is an equivalent for 2013.

 

HOWEVER THIS IS WORST PRACTICE.

 

Like others have said, Exchange is designed to eat all the RAM. Personally I would only start limiting in a lab and never in a lab environment. When you do go live, give it it's own physical box, it doesn't like sharing.

 

Cheers - I technically have a LAB environment (my house is my lab!) so that's not much of an issue for now

Though cannot see why its worst practice to throttle RAM when SCCM complains bitterly during install that SQL isn't throttled??

[Norphy]

I think the problem there is that when you install SCCM and SQL on the same box as you probably would do for anything less than 10,000 clients, SQL would eat all of the available RAM and leave none for SCCM. With a dedicated SQL box, you'd be free to to allocate most or all that you can.

[sven]

It's how exchange works, it will attempt to load as much data as it can into RAM to avoid HDD IO calls, even with an SSD RAM is quicker

 

This guy hit the nail on the head. This is the reason I run Exchange 2010 on it's own dedicated server. It does what it wants, when it wants. Runs like a dream.

[Duke5A]

This guy hit the nail on the head. This is the reason I run Exchange 2010 on it's own dedicated server. It does what it wants, when it wants. Runs like a dream.

 

Agreed. We're running 2010 with 400 mail boxes on a VM with 8GB and four virtual processors. It barely touches the processors but eats all the RAM. Runs fine and mail is the only thing that VM does.