My day job is a Messaging Administrator (LCS 2005, OCS 2007, Exchange 2003/2007) most of our production e-mail environment is Exchange 2003. We have been seeing resource and performance issues across the board including some system instability problems. The root has been tracked to exhausting the pool of Page Table Entries. During the attempt to find the optimal configuration I wanted to track Free PTE usage, I figured someone else may benefit from this spreadsheet.. Note: Moving to a 64 platform with Exchange 2007 resolves this performance issue as well but I am about 12 months away from having the 120,000 production mailboxes moved over.
| Reboot # | Free PTE's | /PAE | /BaseVideo | /UserVA=3030 | /UserVA=2970 | Notes |
| 1 | 26,000 | X | | | X | |
| 2 | 17,000 | X | X | | X | |
| 3 | 18,000 | | X | | X | |
| 4 | 18,000 | | | | X | |
| 5 | 3,000 | | | X | | |
| 6 | 2,000 | X | | X | | |
| 7 | 1,700 | X | X | X | | |
| 8 | 17,000 | X | X | | X | |
| 9 | 18,000 | X | | | X | |
| 10 | 47,000 | X | | | X | Replaced the ATI video driver with "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter" driver |
| 11 | 48,000 | X | X | | X | /BaseVideo works with standard VGA driver |
| 12 | 32,000 | X | X | X | | /PAE / BaseVideo / userva=303 with the generic VGA driver resulted in the optimal configuration |
| 13 | 36,000 | | X | X | | |
| * Hardware used in testing: PACDCEXCMB05 | ||||||
| HP ProLiant DL580 G4 | ||||||
| 16 Cores (Quad processor Xeon 3.0 GHz dual core w/ HT) | ||||||
| 4 GB RAM | ||||||
| Windows Server 2003 SP2 32 Bit | ||||||
| boot.ini contained the following thru all tests: /noexecute=optout /fastdetect | ||||||