Panzer919 wrote: » Let me preface this question by stating upfront that I am not an Exchange admin, I am the Network Engineer for my org and we have an issue that baffles our admin. We have 12 remote sites over MPLS and their links are 2Mb/s. We are currently using email caching and when someone starts to cache their inbox's it chokes the bandwidth. I thought about putting a policy in place to limit this but it would cause the same thing to happen if someone starts caching. Is there any way to limit the bandwidth used by caching on either the client or server? I brought up only downloading headers and mailbox size limitations but this is a law office and they all started throwing a hissy fit over the idea of not having all their emails. Any information would help at this point. Thanks in advance
Turgon wrote: » How about some QoS. Put the smtp traffic in a low queue. You get bandwidth issues then the email is slow but the rest gets through.
Claymoore wrote: » Get rid of Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003. When used together, Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007 allow for partial item synchronization to reduce the amount of data downloaded from the server. To be honest, I'm not sure it's going to help that much though. Some of the perceived slowness may be due to the large mailboxes and large item counts in the primary folders bogging everything down. Exchange/Outlook 2003 are especially bad about this, 2007 is better, but the architecture in Exchange/Outlook 2010 are best for this. Exchange 2007 also introduced a back-off request to throttle back a user performing a high number of RPC operations against a mailbox server. The back off request will slow down the rate of requests, slowing down one client to preserve overall performance for everyone else. Of course if it's slowing down the managing partner, you're still going to hear about it. Those suggestions will probably only bring incremental improvements. I know it's not always the solution, but in this case I would recommend throwing bandwidth at the problem. When you centralize services, you need to keep clients highly connected. 2Mbps isn't highly connected. Going to 10 or 25 Mpbs connections probably wouldn't cost too much and would stop a lot of complaining.