Speed Up you Exchange Management Console & Shell Start Up

Symptoms:

Microsoft Exchange Management Console and shell is taking too long time to open and sometimes it takes forever.

 
Cause:

I’ve been investigating what is happening during the Exchange Management Console or shell startup that is causing this delay,

Thus I run the Microsoft Network Monitor  to sniff the traffic and see what is going on,

I noticed a traffic going to a public IP Address 79.140.95.131 whenever I open the Exchange Management Console or Shell,

At the END of the request you will see as circled below .crl which is an acronym for  Certificate Revocation List

 

 

Seems the feature of checking the certificate revocation list is the one causing the delay as the console will wait till the server access the RL and check the status

More information about CRL can be found below 

1. Revocation list – Wikipedia
2. How Certificate Revocation Works – Microsoft

Resolution:

I removed the check mark on both check for “Check for publisher’s certificate revocation” & “Check for server certificate revocation” from Internet Explorer –> Tools –> Internet Options –> Advanced tab,

 

 
The result is an average of 70 % improvement in the startup time

1. For the Exchange Management Console it improved from an Average of 12  seconds to 4,
2. For the Exchange Management Shell it improved from an Average of 14 seconds to 3.

Note: this is a security feature and you should disable it only the machine where you are using Exchange Consoles and not on the Exchange Servers themselves ! so Be Careful

 see you soon, Hany Donia