Hello,

I've been reading a lot here about Reducing BES impact on Exchange servers.
I've read a lot about I/O - amount of disks, memory etc.

What I am looking for is a way to reduce the frequency of the BES checking the email-boxes. Right now emails do come in faster on the BB then on Outlook itself. I would like the BES to check emails only once every 15 minutes for example.

Does anyone have experience with this and how can I set this?
And what about the Message State databse size?

// I'm running BES 4.1.4 with 200+ users and 1 Exchange 2003 sp2 server. //

Thanks in advance!

The BES doesn't constantly ping or check the mailbox for email. Here is the data flow:

1. Email arrives on Exchange
2. BES receives a UDP packet from the Exchange server notifying of new mail
3. BES retrieves the email
4. Filters are checked
5. Email is encrypted/compressed and forwarded to the BlackBerry network
6. Email is sent the carriers wireless network
7. Email is delivered to the handheld

That's the quick and less technical version. The BES only checks the mailboxes if there has been no activity in the mailbox for 15 or so minutes. You can't change the interval that the BES checks the mailbox. BES can get the email faster then Exchange because it gets notified first.

Think of BES as one big Outlook client, it uses MAPI just Outlook but it uses the server version of MAPI and can process much faster because of that.

Are you noticing performance issues on your Exchange server?

Thanks for your reply, I do get latency issues because of BES. I think it would be a good feature to change this interval even when there are emails. A lot of emails are removed/read within the first 15 minutes that an emails comes in. If you can already file them/read it, then it should reduce the impact and even data costs correct?

I also use a Mobile Outlook (WM6) device and here I can set peak/down-times. It will only sync one an hour during business hours. Maybe this function is also available in the BB policies? However I would prefer to do not use a policy for this but set it on the BES itself.

You cannot change the interval that the BES checks the mailbox. It's hard coded functionality and the Policies do not allow this.

99.999999999% of the time the BEs does not look for email either, it's the Exchange server that tells the BES that there is mail for a user. Only then does the BES get the email. That's why it functions like Outlook, Outlook gets notified the same way as the BES.

If you mean the latency is that the handheld gets the email before Outlook then it's not latency and it's not caused by the BES.

Less then 300 users should not be causing any latency issues like that, unless they have mailboxes outside of the recommended size limit. People with large mailboxes, in excess of 2GB, always end up being the cause of issues. This goes both ways for BES and Exchange.

BB Policies are on the BES. Not sure if you mean a setting on the individual handheld. You will not get the same functionality from your WM device and your BB, and for good reason. BB in my experience outperforms WM devices and the compression on BB is far greater then WM. WM data packets can be up to 143% larger in size then a BB data packet. That means more network traffic and higher data costs. I'll stop here about WM devices, they're not my most loved device.

What kind of latency are you expoeriencing and what leads you to beleive it is the BES?

Are the BES and Exchange on separate machines?

What specs do the machines have?

I'm having Disk Write Latencies and have been tol that this could be because of the BES.

Bes and Exchange are running on different machines but int he same LAN.

Bes= 2x duo 3Ghz 4 GIG ram
Exch=duo 3.2Ghz 4 GIG ram

(I aslo prefer BB above WM )

LOL, WM = , BB =

The BES does place a heavier work load on the Exchange server when it does a mailbox rescan(every 15 - 20 minutes) or during activations. Also, the larger the mailbox the longer the scan will take.

I haven't heard of the Disk Write latency but I've never asked either. But you cannot change how the BES gets the email or the mailbox rescan interval though

I can't think of a work around either for this, the BES is going to do what it does and it will add to the Exchange resource use.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

no worries, thank you for your input!

Take a look at your Avg. Disk Queue Length for the drive that contains your Exchange Databases. According to M$ the queue length shouldn't exceed the number of spindles in the array (with the expecption of a few spikes). If you are seeing high disk latency check the following:

• How many disks are in your array with the Exchange DB's
• How fast are these drives?
• Does the Queue Length trend (rising at certain times of the day)?
• How many users on the servers?
• How many of those users are BB users?
• How many users are in Chached Mode in Outlook and how many in On-Line?
• How many people have additional mailboxes added to their profile?
• How many users on a single agent for that server?

The more probable reason is that Outlook is using cached mode, so it is not a constant mapi connection to the mailbox itself. My moderately loaded server delivers Berry messages instantaneously, however outlook clients have a 10 - 20 second lag behind.