Exchange 2003 Tuning

The Performance Optimizer could be used to move databases and transaction log files to different (presumably faster) disks, and it could also be used to limit the amount of memory that the information store (STORE.EXE) could consume. The Performance Optimizer was removed from Exchange starting with Exchange 2000, and it remains missing from Exchange 2003. It was removed because Exchange 2000 (and now Exchange 2003) was made to be self-tuning. If you need to move the databases and transaction logs, that functionality is now found in ESM; however, if you want to limit the amount of memory used by Exchange, you are out of luck—there is no longer any supported way to do this. 

Generally speaking, the goal of performance tuning is to decrease server response time while supporting more users. Most of the tuning and performance boosts you can get from Exchange 2003 come from choosing appropriately sized hardware and from employing best practices for the design and deployment of Exchange. Let's dive into the new tuning parameters in Exchange 2003. Some of these parameters (e.g., the BOOT.INI switches, the OWA spell-check throttling, and so on) are the tuning options for Exchange 2003.