Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Distilled

Improved Memory Management

In 32-bit Windows systems, there are two kinds of memory: physical memory (the amount of actual memory installed in the system) and virtual memory (a virtualized 4GB memory space). Regardless of how much physical memory is installed on the system, the total amount of virtual memory is always the same: 4GB. Virtual memory is especially important to monitor and manage on Exchange servers for two reasons: (1) the more virtual memory available to Exchange, the greater the load it can handle (e.g., you can add more users), and (2) performance problems can occur (especially with clustered Exchange servers) when virtual memory becomes too fragmented. If virtual memory fragmentation is severe on a clustered Exchange server, ...