Inconsistently Slow Outlook / Large Mailboxes

[ben.ruset]

Hi --

I have two executives that have very, very large mailboxes - 4+GB and
approx 50-70k items. Moving their data to a PST, or archiving it in
any way is out of the question.

They're both on brand new PC's -- one has a laptop and one has a
desktop, both 1.6ghz Core2 Duos with 2GB of RAM. Both are using
Outlook 2003 with all of the latest patches and service packs loaded.
They're both using cached mode, and both have GigE to their machines.

There are times that both users are able to click through their
messages with no problems. There's other times that they will get lags
of 10-30 seconds from going between messages. (Measuring the amount of
time it takes from clicking on a message from the time it takes to
appear in the preview pane.) Sorting messages is slow, but not
unacceptably slow.

Using perfmon on my Exchange server, I see no bottlenecks.

I understand that the size of both of their mailboxes is way outside
the scope of Microsoft's best practices, however wouldn't that yield
consistently bad performance? Both users experience periods that
Outlook works okay, and then periods that it doesn't.

Neither user really has any other apps installed (besides Google
Desktop, which they use for searching their huge mailboxes). We're
using Trend Micro Office Scan for our anti-virus solution, although I
do not believe it does any scanning at the MAPI layer.

My CEO is very upset that his brand new laptop works just as badly -
if not worse - with Outlook than his old one.

If anybody has any suggestions, I'd be very grateful to hear them.

Thanks,
-ben

 

[Travis]

This may help explain the poor performance:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/905803

 

[ben.ruset]

Right, except that doesn't explain why it happens sometimes and not
others.

I totally agree that they're outside of the scope of what Microsoft
recommends, but if that was truly the cause of the problem, why would
it not happen all the time?

 

[ktdunn]

I am experiencing the same issue in our offices. In fact, just minutes ago,
a user explained it as, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, I can
scroll through my inbox (6,566 items) and it shows them in the reading pane
quickly, but then it will hang up, or stop and he does get that message that
Outlook is retrieving data from the Microsoft Exchange Server
ExchangeServerName.

Doesn't that message occur during an RPC (remote procedure call) that might
take longer than the average 5 seconds? I read a MS paper on it the other
day, which basically said that it happens from time to time, but in our case,
it is 15 - 20 times a day for most users. Most of our users have large
folders and many have mailboxes over 2 gig. I am going to have this
particular user trim down his inbox and see what results.