Microsoft KB Archive/152896

= XADM: MTA Startup Slow When Database is Large =

Article ID: 152896

Article Last Modified on 10/28/2006

-

APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 Standard Edition

-



This article was previously published under Q152896



SYMPTOMS
After an abnormal shutdown, the Microsoft Exchange Message Transfer Agent (MTA) service may take an extremely long time to start. On large databases, this could mean several hours.



MORE INFORMATION
Microsoft Exchange does several file checksums to each individual Db*.dat file located in the \Exchsrvr\mtadata directory each time the MTA starts after an abnormal shutdown has occurred. This is done to maintain file integrity to prevent further MTA failures. Microsoft Exchange may scan each file several times and, in some cases, this can be thousands of files with gigabytes of information.

Microsoft has determined that some of the file integrity checks performed by the MTA are too CPU intensive and redundant and offer no cost effective gain to maintaining database integrity over other, faster, methods.



STATUS
Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Microsoft Exchange Server version 4.0. This problem was corrected in Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 U.S. Service Pack 2. For information on obtaining the service pack, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (without the spaces):

S E R V P A C K

Additional query words: shutdown startup msexchangemta slow hang crash

Keywords: kbusage KB152896

-

[mailto:TECHNET@MICROSOFT.COM Send feedback to Microsoft]

© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.