Horribly slow performance on Entourage - some explorations andrequest for help

[Russ]

Like many people, I am experiencing periodic instances of Entourage
2008 going catatonic (displaying the beach ball of death and refusing
text input or any other user action).

One thing that I notice in the activity monitor is that when Entourage
goes catatonic, it seems to be reading a BIG file. It does this
repeatedly. My theory is that there is some periodic process that
runs and somewhat foolishly believes that it has to read the entire
database (mine is huge) or at least a large chunk of it. There is
plenty of disk space, lots of free memory, and activity monitor shows
essentially no paging activity, so that is not the problem. I am an
Exchange user, and I have the periodic data base verifier turned off,
since all the data is on Exchange.

Turning off Sync services MAY help, but I am not 100% certain, since
turning off the check boxes in preferences doesn't seem to have an
effect (at least before I quit and restart Entourage). This is
inconvenient, since I need them on to sync to iCal so I can sync to my
PDA (a whole further plague of problems!)

Does anyone have an explanation of all this? Even better, any work-
arounds?

 

[Russ]

Like many people, I am experiencing periodic instances of Entourage
2008 going catatonic (displaying the beach ball of death and refusing
text input or any other user action).

One thing that I notice in the activity monitor is that when Entourage
goes catatonic, it seems to be reading a BIG file.  It does this
repeatedly.  My theory is that there  is some periodic process that
runs and somewhat foolishly believes that it has to read the entire
database (mine is huge) or at least a large chunk of it.   There is
plenty of disk space, lots of free memory, and activity monitor shows
essentially no paging activity, so that is not the problem. I am an
Exchange user, and  I have the periodic data base verifier turned off,
since all the data is on Exchange.

Turning off Sync services MAY help, but I am not 100% certain, since
turning off the check boxes in preferences doesn't seem to have an
effect (at least before I quit and restart Entourage).  This is
inconvenient, since I need them on to sync to iCal so I can sync to my
PDA  (a whole further plague of problems!)

Does anyone have an explanation of all this?  Even better, any work-
arounds?

Addendum: Turning off request for sync to iCal, etc. seems to have NO
effect on this problem.

 

[Diane Ross]

Have you excluded your database from Spotlight indexing. Under Privacy in
Spotlight add your Identity folder.

 

[Diane Ross]

Like many people, I am experiencing periodic instances of Entourage
2008 going catatonic (displaying the beach ball of death and refusing
text input or any other user action).

Options in Entourage that can improve performance:

* Add your Identities folder to Spotlight Exclude list
* Turn off the background database check
* Investigate your Project Center projects
* Check your preferences for linking
* Check Sort Order in Address Book

For more detailed help troubleshooting performance see:

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/performance.html>

For Office 2008 specific help: (46,47,48)

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/crashes.html#crash46>

 

[Russ]

Options in Entourage that can improveperformance:

*  Add your Identities folder to Spotlight Exclude list
*  Turn off the background database check
*  Investigate your Project Center projects
*  Check your preferences for linking
*  Check Sort Order in Address Book

For more detailed help troubleshootingperformancesee:

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/performance.html>

For Office 2008 specific help: (46,47,48)

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/crashes.html#crash46>

Thanks for all suggestions. I do not think spotlight affects things.
Main new data point is that forcing Exchange offline and turning off
sync services does seem to "work" in stopping Entourage from doing its
big read. But this is not all that desirable solution. Is there any
way to set the frequency at which Entourage tries to sync to Exchange
or to things on my Mac???

 

[Diane Ross]

Is there any
way to set the frequency at which Entourage tries to sync to Exchange
or to things on my Mac???

Sorry, the answer is no. It's not possible to adjust Entourage's sync
schedule with Exchange.

 

[Russ]

Sorry, the answer is no. It's not possible to adjustEntourage'ssync
schedule with Exchange.

Thanks for follow-up. Next question is there any way to force
Entourage to reduce the size of the giant file it seems to insist on
reading every minute or so? I suppose that hoping for Microsoft to
fix what seems to be an unfortunate design is not an option. Here
are the constraints as I see them:


1. I would like recent mail (within last few months) to be kept on
Exchange
2. I would like older mail to be backed up on Exchange and accessible
from Entourage
3. I would like ALL mail to be indexed by spotlight

I keep older email in separate Exchange folders. These tend to be
very large. One possibility would be to try to find some other way of
doing safety backup/restore of old emails and then move the oldmail
folders to the "on my computer" portion of entourage. This presumably
would get them out of the Entourage Exchange cache. But the total
size of the identity would still be the same, and rebuilding the
database when there is a crash (happens not infrequently with
Entourage) would be harder. Only worth trying if someone can tell me
if Entourage's big periodic read is only for the Exchange cache, and
not for the entire database.

So ... What does Entourage actually read during its big read.

Russ

 

[Diane Ross]

Next question is there any way to force
Entourage to reduce the size of the giant file it seems to insist on
reading every minute or so?

You can move your older mail to folders "On My Computer". There is a free
script (works in Tiger, but currently broken in Leopard) that will archive
your mail. On the page to download is a link to a third party option,
Entourage Exchange Accounts Optimize 10US that does the same thing and works
in Leopard.

AutoArchive Exchange Account to "On My Computer"

Move all e-mail older than 60 days (time adjustable) from your Exchange
account folders to archive folders within the "On My Computer" folder tree.

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/exchange/autoarchive.html>

I'm not an Exchange user so have only basic help that I can give. Spotlight
can index all your mail that is in folders "On My Computer". It is really
fast in Entourage 2008.

For really old mail that you want access to, you could set up archive
Identities in Entourage, but Spotlight only seeing the current Identity.
Switching Identities in Entourage gives you access to your really old mail
and keeps it safe as it's not constantly being used in addition to keeping
your database smaller.

You can drag messages to the desktop and Spotlight will see those. It's a
time consuming process because there is a limit of 199 items at a time you
can drag to the desktop.

If you continue to need help, I would start a new subject with "Exchange" in
the name. You also might want to ask on the Entourage talk list. Lots of
experienced users there that never visit the newsgroup.

How to subscribe to the Microsoft Entourage talk list:

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/support_options/subtalk.html>

 

[William Smith]

Thanks for follow-up. Next question is there any way to force
Entourage to reduce the size of the giant file it seems to insist on
reading every minute or so? I suppose that hoping for Microsoft to
fix what seems to be an unfortunate design is not an option. Here
are the constraints as I see them:

Hi Russ!

The big file is Entourage's Database. What it's doing is normal. I
suspect you're connecting via your Outlook Web Access (OWA) address
rather than your back-end server's address and/or you have a very large
Inbox.

Have a look at this blog post for optimizing your setup:

"Optimize Entourage to better work with Exchange"
<http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/03/optimize_entourage_to_better_work_with_exchange.html>


Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>