Hi I'm currently running Exchange 2007. I get several complaints regarding outlook sticking or the notification baloon popping up "Outlook is trying to retrieve data from exchange.domain". Its installed on a new box - quad core Xeon, 16GB of RAM, 15K disks and has about 60 light user mailboxes on it. I ran the performance troubleshooter and everything is fine except for the following Severe Error:- Unusually high user activity detected > RPC Operations per second indicate a user or users on this server are unusually active. Having checked the "tell me more about this issue and how to resolve it" I can see using perfmon that my RPC operations are slightly high (0.2 higher than liked) and that I do have a high number of logons (around 450). We use a an inhouse app that syncronizes data from Outlook to a SQL databases and vice versa, which I'm monitoring to see if its the cause? Even if it is how do you improve RPC operations? Surely 450 logons isn't a massive figure for an Enterprise level mailserver like Exchange. If you figure 2-3 connections per user, say 3 that would be 150 users is to high for a single box?

I would break out Exmon, install it on the server and see which mapi user is drilling that server. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9A49C22E-E0C7-4B7C-ACEF-729D48AF7BC9&displaylang=en Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor

Sorry should have mentioned that I have already tried running that and there is no one user that hammering the server.

Ok, so if you disable the SQL app do things get better? Do the RPC issues and popups in Outlook happen at a particular time of day? Any pattern? Have you seen? http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/05/25/405353.aspx 'Requesting data from the Exchange server...' or 'Outlook is trying to retrieve data…' client messages http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892764 Any blackberries? Outlook Add-ins? 3rd party Mapi apps? Desktop Searching etc...? I'm surprised you didnt find anything in Exmon, its usually a pretty good finder of the culprit. Did you run in when the problem was happening or set up a trace and match up the times when users are experiencing the popups in Outlook?

Tried disabling the Sync app all day yesterday and made no difference so I can at least rule that out.I think I'll run exmon a bit more, well thats the plan but I now get the "unknown Start trace error (183)" error popping up.I've looked around and read that the following command stops the still running trace "Tracelog -stop "Exchange Event Trace"" after downloading the Windows resource kit. Problem is in the resource kit tracelog.exe is no listed. Any Ideas?Thanks for the links also AndyD, I'll work though them.I did also spot that 2 of the chief complainers/users with this error have got a few mailfolders with other 5000 emails in. Which I have just found out MS doesn't recommend due to indexing constraints. 5000+ crazy, housekeeping email to be sent around!Still would like to understand how to increase the threshold of the number of RPC operations an exchange server can deal with. I mean if the bottleneck is with disks you get faster disks, more spindles, faster RAID level etc, if theres not enough memory you add more, same with processing, network load etc but what do you need to upgrade or change to be able to deal with more RPC operations?

Hi Theelk, Per you descripton, the issue seems related with exchange performance. About troubleshooting slow RPC request processing issues, you could refer to below link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc540464(EXCHG.80).aspx Per my experience, it is not recommended to change the threshold of the RPC operation. If you use the Exmon tool gather the detail information, you could according to the below and check whether the count is healthy. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201689(EXCHG.80).aspx Does the SMTP queue folder and all the database files are on different disk, they are all disk ensitive, so they are better in different disk. A good article for the related issue. http://blogs.technet.com/mikelag/archive/2009/12/14/improved-pal-analysis-for-exchange-2007.aspx Other reason would cause the issue pop up " outlook is trying..." -client (or add-in) problems you could enable the log on the client and check the special client -network related issues you could use the netmon to analyze it -large number of items in mailboxes it seems exactly with the 2 users you referred to, so you could archieve the items for the -some third party software such as antivirus sofware for exchange email filter Regards! gavin

Thanks Gavin, The two users have been sorted now, it was due to poor email management and having folders with >5000 emails in. Although the two articles have cofused me a little more if I'm honest. I have added the recommended perfmon counters and they are all either reporting back with either 0 or 1 (so Very low). This is with the exception of RPC Operations/sec which had an average reading of 39. So 3 of the the 4 counters were well below the recommended thresholds yet at the same time I ran the troubleshooting assistant and I get the same high user RPC activity warning. I would say 35-40 of our users connect to Exchange in online (non-cached) mode as they are working from a Terminal Server, the remaining 20 users will be working in cached mode with Outlook locally. Would that have an impact?

Latest Service Pack and Update Rollup? SP2 UR3 for example had some fixes for store locking issues that could cause this... although 60 users is pretty light.

Hi Theelk, Sure, 60 users would be light for your system. It is better to update the latest kb, refer to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e4f8c697-3a33-445e-a7c2-a2df53c40f85&displaylang=en http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979784 Regards! gavin