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Why is store.exe consuming all our available resources?

We are running Exchange 5.5 on Windows 2000 and until recently we didn't seem to have any issues. Lately, however, I have been noticing the store.exe process seems to consume all the available resoures. I can reset the information store and it slowly climbs again to full usage. I have defragged the data base and reapplied SP, but it still happens . Any ideas?
By design, the Exchange Information Store process (store.exe) will consume all available memory; however, consuming excessive CPU is not part of that design. There are a few things that can cause this behavior.

- The store might be trying decode a corrupt message from its compressed RTF form into an Exchange message body form.
- The store process might be unable to get the next Message ID during public folder replication and is caught in a loop or perhaps there's just some piece of mail looping.

Have a look at the threads in the store process and see if it's one thread using 100% CPU or whether multiple threads are running away with the CPU.

Then, head on over to http://support.microsoft.com and do a search using Exchange 5.5 as the product, and "store" and "cpu" in the title. You'll find a few hits that might be helpful.

Finally, if you have Exchange-aware anti-virus software installed, try stopping it and see if you still have the problem. If you don't have Exchange-aware AV software, but you do have file system AV software, make sure it is not scanning your databases, logs or other Exchange data files.

This was first published in September 2001

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