6.10. Determining How Much Whitespace Is in a Database
Problem
You wish to determine how much available "whitespace" exists within a given database.
Solution
Using a graphical user interface
Open the Event Viewer (eventvwr.msc).
Click on the Application event log.
Select View→ Filter.
In the Event ID box, type 1221 and click OK.
View the most recent occurrence of event 1221 for each mailbox or public folder store.
Using a command-line interface
Dismount the database (see Recipe 6.8).
Run the eseutil command with the
/msswitch:> \Exchsrvr\bin\eseutil.exe /ms
pathToDatabaseFilewhere
pathToDatabaseFileis the location (including filename) of the file whose whitespace information you want.The output of the file dump mode will indicate the amount of database free space in kilobytes.
Remount the database (see Recipe 6.7).
Discussion
Many administrators are keen to understand how much whitespace is contained in their Exchange databases. This space includes database pages that were once allocated but have been freed. In most cases, an EDB/STM file pair will grow steadily over time, but if you've done something to shrink the actual amount of mail data in the file pair (such as moving mailboxes to another server or purging old mail), there may be a substantial amount of disk space allocated to the file but unused by Exchange.
The amount of whitespace is especially important to know in Exchange Server Standard Edition when the database size is approaching the 16 GB limit. Unfortunately, there is ...