DOCUMENT:Q163297  19-DEC-1999  [exchange]
TITLE   :XCON: MTA Taking a Long Time to Start
PRODUCT :Microsoft Exchange
PROD/VER:winnt:4.0,5.0,5.5
OPER/SYS:
KEYWORDS:kbusage exc4 exc5 exc55

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The information in this article applies to:

 - Microsoft Exchange Server, versions 5.5, 4.0, 5.0 
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SUMMARY
=======

The message transfer agent (MTA) may take a long time to start if there is a
large number of DB*.DAT files in the MTADATA directory when the service is
restarted. This is normal and expected behavior but is often misinterpreted as a
problem. Administrators often mistakenly believe that the MTA is not responding
and they complicate the issue by stopping the MTA service.

MORE INFORMATION
================

When the MTA starts, up it has to rebuild the queues in memory. If there are a
lot of DAT files, this can take quite some time.

One quick check you can perform is to set the MTA's logging on Field Engineering
to Maximum and then monitor the 2166 and 2167 events for the number of objects
in each of the queues. There is no hard and fast rule, but if you have 100,000
DAT files at startup, it is reasonable to expect the queues to grow to at least
that total size before assuming the MTA is not responding.

   Event ID: 2166
   Source:   MSExchangeMTA
   Category: Field Engineering
   Description:
   A call from %1 process %2 was completed, adding object %3 to queue %4.
   Queue %4 now contains %5 items. [%6 %7 %8 %9] (6)

   Event ID: 2167
   Source:   MSExchangeMTA
   Category: Field Engineering
   Description:
   A call from %1 process %2 was completed, removing object %3 from queue
   %4. Queue %4 now contains %5 items. [%6 %7 %8 %9] (6)

Additional query words: hung kill locked server down

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Keywords          : kbusage exc4 exc5 exc55 
Technology        : kbExchangeSearch kbExchange500 kbExchange550 kbExchange400 kbZNotKeyword2
Version           : winnt:4.0,5.0,5.5

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