Microsoft KB Archive Search

Notice: This website is an unofficial Microsoft Knowledge Base (hereinafter KB) archive and is intended to provide a reliable access to deleted content from Microsoft KB. All KB articles are owned by Microsoft Corporation. Read full disclaimer for more details.

  1. Home
  2. MSExchangeMailboxAssistants service crashes when memory usage exceeds 2 GB

MSExchangeMailboxAssistants service crashes when memory usage exceeds 2 GB

View products that this article applies to.

Symptoms

You find that the MSExchangeMailboxAssistants.exe process is using more than 2 gigabytes (GB) of memory and may crash. Additionally, the following event may be logged in the System log:

Log Name: System
Source: Service Control Manager
Date: 3/5/2014 10:43:59 AM
Event ID: 7031
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: MBXSERVER.domain.com
Description:The Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Assistants service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 5000 milliseconds: Restart the service.

↑ Back to the top

Cause

This problem occurs because Microsoft Exchange Server has a built-in timer for the Mailbox Assistants Service that periodically measures how much memory the process is using. If the timer determines that the process is using more than 2 GB of memory, Exchange stops the process as a remediation step.

↑ Back to the top

Workaround

To work around this problem and improve high memory usage for this process, change the Garbage Collection type. By default, the Workstation garbage collection type is used instead of the Server garbage collection type. Change the type to "Server" as a workaround. This is because this garbage collection type has several performance advantages that will help clean up freed memory more quickly than the Workstation option. This makes it less likely that the process will continue to use more than�2 GB of memory long enough for the process to crash.

Change the garbage collection type for the process in the MSExchangeMailboxServerAssistants.exe.config configuration file. This file is located in the \bin folder in the Exchange installation folder. The following is the default contents of the configuration file:

<configuration>
<runtime>
<gcConcurrent enabled="false"/>
<generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false" />
</runtime>
<appSettings>
</appSettings>
</configuration>
To change the garbage collection type to "Server," specify the following settings in the file:

<configuration>
<runtime>
<gcServer enabled="true"/>
<generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false" />
</runtime>
<appSettings>
</appSettings>
</configuration>

Note The Server garbage collection type works only on servers that have more than one processor (physical or virtual). After you make the change to the configuration file, restart the Mailbox Assistants service for the change to take effect.

↑ Back to the top

Keywords: KB2957144, kbprb, kbexpertiseinter, kbsurveynew

↑ Back to the top

Article Info
Article ID : 2957144
Revision : 1
Created on : 5/3/2014
Published on : 5/3/2014
Exists online : False
Views : 989