Entourage Slow Performance/Spinning Beach Ball/Hanging/ HELP!

[Storage]

Hello To All;

I'll be short and to the point.

I have about 3 Mac Entourage users, 2 complaint about Entourage slow
performance issue when opening, replying and just plain typing emails.
One of these user is a new user setup and has not encounter this issue
yet.

My Mac environment consist of..

1 Mac Server Running OS 10.2 (I believe this is Jaguar)
This server acts as roaming or sharing profile server since all my 3
user profiles or accounts are stored on this server.

The 2 users having issues with Entourage have 20inch iMacs running on
PowerPC 1.8 ghz 2GB of DDR PC3200 ram.

1 user not having any issues yet is running and OLD G4 on Dual PowerPC
1GHZs at 768MB of ram.

All users have OS 10.3.9 (Panther) Entourage 2004 v.11.3.7 connecting
to and Exchange 2003 Standard email server.

Let me rule out a couple of things before going further...

Apparently this is not a hardware issue because the oldest and slower
Mac has no issue with Entourage.

They are running Panther so Spotlight has is a non issue.

They do not use Project Center.

Both of these users Main Identities databases are about 630 MB hardly
huge.

I have read up on many Entourage issues and it seems like everyone
that uses Entourage sooner or later have problems with it.

One last thing, I have verified, compacted, rebuilt all databases and
have unchecked database integrity from running in the background. I
guess what I am saying is that I need help because I have run out of
things to try to fix this Entourage issue.

Any Help will be GREATLY Appreciated!

 

[Diane]

I have about 3 Mac Entourage users, 2 complaint about Entourage slow
performance issue when opening, replying and just plain typing emails.
One of these user is a new user setup and has not encounter this issue
yet.

You don't mention if these are exchange accounts. It could be possible that
when they open and are trying to sync this slows Entourage to a crawl. I
would disable any startup schedules.

See this page for help with performance issues:
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/performance.html>

Please let us know if you find the cause.

 

[Storage]

You don't mention if these are exchange accounts. It could be possible that
when they open and are trying to sync this slows Entourage to a crawl. I
would disable any startup schedules.

See this page for help with performance issues:
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/performance.html>

Please let us know if you find the cause.

To answer your first question they are Exchange accounts. What makes
this so hard for me to troubleshoot is that it does not happen all the
time.
For instance it will work great all day except at around 4 or 5
o'clock PM It will sometimes slow down when replying to an email. A
good example is of this is
trying to start typing a reply will cause a spinning beach ball and
slow keystroke responses.

Thanks for you help.

--Adner

 

[Diane]

To answer your first question they are Exchange accounts. What makes
this so hard for me to troubleshoot is that it does not happen all the
time.
For instance it will work great all day except at around 4 or 5
o'clock PM It will sometimes slow down when replying to an email. A
good example is of this is
trying to start typing a reply will cause a spinning beach ball and
slow keystroke responses.

If it's happening at a specific time, if there some action the server is
performing in the background that is slowing everything to a crawl?

Use the Activity Monitor in Apple Utilities folder. When things slow down,
take a look at what CPU activity is going on. It might help identify what is
causing the slowdown. Also check your page ins/outs.

You are running some older software on older machines so you're not going to
see optimal performance. You mentioned your server was Jaguar. I'm sure
there have been lots of improvements since then. The user with 768MB of ram
has just barely enough to run the OS much less Office and any other
applications that might be open.

Hopefully the Activity Monitor will shed some light on the problem.