Store, ESE Cache and FAST demystified

Richard Schwendiman offers another demystification post, this time looking at Store and ESE process memory usage and architecture for Exchange Server 2013.

After getting a great community response on my Exchange 2013 Mail flow Demystified blog I decided to do a similar one on Store, FAST, and ESE Cache. Much like mail flow, a lot has changed with Exchange 2013 in terms of Store. So hopefully I can help clarify exactly what has changed in 2013 with these components. First let’s start with Store since this is the core to your Mailbox Server.

Lots of information on how the memory allocation game has changed with this release, and how tuning the ESE cache can improve performance:

Anyone who has worked with Exchange 2010 or older knows if you look at processes, Store.exe takes the majority of a server’s memory (75-90%). This by design and is the default behavior. ESE (store.exe) will release memory back to the system if it is needed by another process. You can also set the msExchESEParamCacheSizeMax registry key to specify the max memory ESE can consume on that server. This design worked great for Exchange 2010 and previous versions but due to significant changes in 2013 this process had to be re-architected.

Because Exchange 2013 needs more memory for other processes like Search (FAST) and Transport, we had to limit the amount of RAM that ESE uses. Now with 2013, ESE (Store) will use 25% of the total RAM in the system.

Worth checking out!

Posted by Tristan Kington , MSPFE Editor avec no cherry on top