It's normal to see a bit of a delay when Unity is first coming online, since there are some initialization routines taking place right after a restart. Make sure you're not running out of disk space, and that there are not a lot of other unecessary applications or services running in the background. If there are power management options that park the disk drives, this can cause sluggish response after periods of inactivity. If there is a lot of disk swapping going on, you may need to add RAM or increase your pagefile. Run the Exchange Optimizer if you haven't done that in a while. Make sure your Unity, CCM, and the LAN they are connected to are free of hostile code like the Nimda viworm, which can hog bandwidth and create denial of service conditions on the network.
Running Exchange and Unity (especially with large databases) is pretty resource-intensive. Factor in the web server for administration and stuff like codec conversion, and the server can get taxed in a hurry. If you're also doing things like running a DC or DNS server on the box, that's asking quite a bit of your CPU. Make sure your hardware is capable of the demands you're putting on it. Microsoft has plenty of information online about measuring server performance if you need it.
Scott Morgan
Cisco Systems TAC
