
360 5.3 Memory Optimization for Exchange 2003
Microsoft Exchange’s use of buffering has vastly improved over time and
has been notably enhanced in relation to the ability to flush contiguous log
buffers to disk. With Exchange 5.5, buffers were written individually, typi-
cally as 1–2 KB I/O. Starting with Exchange 2000 SP1, the log flush algo-
rithm was such that transactions that are written contiguously can be
gathered together into a smaller number of larger I/O—fitting perfectly
well-replicated storage scenarios and taking advantage of increasing disk
transfer speeds (320 MB/s is now quite common for back-end SCSI drives)
and saving on the spindle limitations ...