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Defragment Exchange information store database files

Serdar Yegulalp
07.12.2007
Rating: -3.60- (out of 5)

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In addition to defragmenting Microsoft Outlook .PST files for better performance, Mark Russinovich's Contig utility can be used to defragment Microsoft Exchange information store database files.

Exchange Server information store databases can get fragmented in one of two ways: internally or externally.

An internal fragmentation occurs when the data structures within the database file itself have become fragmented. The Exchange server typically addresses this kind of fragmentation on its own, usually during the 4 a.m. daily maintenance cycle.

It's possible to force an internal defragmentation of an Exchange information store database by using the ESEUTIL /D command, but this is not something you should do casually. Typically, this is only done as part of a disaster recovery operation, and is not something you need to do as regular maintenance.

An external fragmentation occurs when the physical files that make up the Exchange d

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atabases become fragmented -- i.e., the clusters that make up the database files are scattered across the disk.

If an external fragmentation occurs, does it make sense to defragment the Exchange database files using a tool like Contig? Here are some of the pro and con arguments for this scenario:

[TABLE]

There are other nuances to the argument, such as the observation that file fragments greater than 64 MB don't tend to be problematic (and in fact the latest version of the command-line DEFRAG tool is programmed to ignore fragments larger than 64 MB for a single file by default).

But on the whole, it's OK to defragment the Exchange information store in a judicious way. Here are some best practices:

About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of Windows Insight, a newsletter devoted to hints, tips, tricks, news and goodies for all flavors of Windows users.

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