Messages stuck in "Local Delivery" queue

[DB]

What would cause messages getting stuck in "Local Delivery". I have an
Exchange 2003 Enterprise Server with SP2 hosting about 20 mail stores, 400
mailboxes and relatively very high email usage.

Occasionally in mid day messages stop delivering to user mailboxes and we
see them queuing up in the "local delivery" queue which shows messages as
"Queued" and the queue as active.

Letting the server just sit for 15-30 minutes and suddenly all the email
backlogged (can by well over 10,000 messages at this stage) will suddenly
start processing. On other occasions we lose patience and rebooting the
server caused the queues to flush too.

No noticeable disk or CPU bottlenecks on the server and GC/LDAP/DC servers
are locally available.

GroupShield was removed from the server to rule it out.

What might be happening here? Any ideas?

(nothing in event logs and ExBPA says that Exchange looks fine!)

The only thing we found that may be an issues is the location of the working
folder that the information store uses for e-mail message conversion is
located. We did not see any disk queuing on this drive but have gone ahead
and changed this anyway (see Message Flow to the Local Delivery Queue Is Very
Slow - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822936)

[Jamestechman]

Go over GC load as well as DSACCESS. Verify that sites and services
are configured correctly so that your Exchange server is not using
remote GCs. This can cause local delivery queue build up.

James Chong (MVP)
MCITP | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+,
Security+, Project+, ITIL
msexchangetips.blogspot.com

[DB]

GC and DSACCESS is fine. This was one of the first things we verified.

MS support are thinking we might have some database blocking going on due to
high activity and local jourmnalling. We have moved all journalling
mailboxes to a seperate exchange server and are watching closly now to see if
the problem returns.

[Jamestechman]

That could be it; if the journal mailbox is also on the same store
that is being journaled high IO could occur. In some instances users
have reported complete mail flow stoppage.

"If you want to journal mailboxes that reside on an Exchange 2003
mailbox database, the journaling mailbox must be located in an
Exchange 2003 mailbox database that does not have journaling enabled."

"If you put a journaling mailbox in an Exchange 2003 mailbox database
that is being journaled, excessive disk utilization can occur."

Understanding Journaling in a Mixed Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007
Environment
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997918(EXCHG.80).aspx

James Chong (MVP)
MCITP | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+,
Security+, Project+, ITIL
msexchangetips.blogspot.com

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