Best practices for pagefile on an Exchange server with a large amount of RAM?

Solution 1:

The official recommendation from Microsoft, which hasn't changed since NT 4.0) is:

• System Disk Page File
  • 8GB+: RAM Size + 10MB minimum
  • <8GB: 1.5x RAM
• Adding page files to other disks may increase performance up to the maximum
• Total of all page files 1.5x RAM maximum, but only because Windows will never make productive use of more than that. If it's using page consistently, you need more RAM.

As you've mentioned the page file on the System drive must be as big as RAM + 10MB to get a full memory dump should the server crash. I've never found a full memory dump to be useful in diagnosing a server crash any more than a mini-dump. Servers should be configured for either mini-dumps or full-dumps, whichever you feel is going to be most beneficial to you when diagnosing crashes.

Specific to Exchange 2003, 2007, and 2010: They all defer to the OS recommendations for the page file, which is the same for WinNT 4.0 to Server 2012 as shown above. Other versions are probably the same, but I'm not familiar with them and haven't dug out the documentation.

What I would have done: Kept the 147GB disks with mini-dumps configured and about 16GB of page file.

Solution 2:

Per a 2014 Exchange Team blog post, their current recommendation for Exchange 2013 'the smaller of RAM+10MB or 32,778MB'. In your case, 96GB RAM, you'd want to use the 32778MB for the page file.

Ref: You had me at EHLO