Ways to speed up Entourage 2004 ?

[Scott]

I'd like to ask the long-time users of Entourage what they've found
works to help speed up the app when it starts really slowing down.

Been using E'rage since its first OS9 rendition. For the past 4 months,
my Entourage (11.2.5) has become painfully slow to use. Typing is
always a character or 2 behind. Deletion takes a few seconds. Etc.
Because E'rage is the center of my entire business, this has become
unworkable.

Here's what I've done so far:

·· I've been vigilant about keeping the Identity folder fairly
small, well below 1 gig, even though I get 200 emails a day. I
constantly completely delete all Sent and Delete items older than 6
months ago
·· I remove all attachments larger than 500K.
·· I've rebuilt and compressed the Identity many times.
·· I have very few Rules (6 total) and only 14 total Folders and
subfolders (if this matters in terms of speed).
·· About once every 10 months, I duplicate the Identity, strip out
stuff I don't need to look at on a weekly basis, rebuild that, and use
that as the only Identity.
·· Twice I have started from a new completely empty Identity, and
using Paul's Import/Export apps, brought over the Accounts, Calendar,
and Address book.
·· I have 3600 Contacts in the Address book.
·· I don't use the Project Center. I have about 200 Tasks. I use
the Calendar and Office Notifications daily.

At this point, I'm open to ANY ideas. If someone says that deleting
Entourage and installing it again from the disks will speed it up
(complete with a blank brand new Identity), I'm game to do it.

Any ideas?

Many thanks,

Scott

 

[Bruce Young 33 sbc]

Hi, you have done even more than I usually do, so let me share my
observations of it:

I agree that Entourage has sometimes PAINFULLY slow, when I could easily
out-type ahead of it. But there are other times when at least the typing
seems decent. Lately, over last few months, it seems rare that I can type
ahead of it (and I don't think I am slowing down that much ;-) So I think
that some of the updates have helped to speed up the typing display
responsiveness.

But one area that remains slow is scrolling or arrow cursor up and down
inside the message body. Nothing seems to speed that up (and it is specific
to Entourage, as other apps practically scream the scroll or cursor arrow up
and down).
So there is definitely something inside Entourage that is slowing the user
interface down.

Maybe it is that hidden machine instruction: "If machine-type = Macintosh,
Then slow user-interface by variable factor {2x-10x}"

Seriously though, I think the Mac Business Unit does not have that
directive, but it is strange that the Mac Office products I use - Word,
Entourage, Excel - (In my experience) have much slower user interface
response than same product running on comparable GHz PC. :-(

So the things that I do to try to keep Entourage as quick as possible:
- Always stay up-to-date with OS X, (and do the formal clean way of
installing them -- see MacFixit or MacInTouch or MacUpdate for summary)
- Stay up-to-date with the MS Office X updates
- Periodically use Option-Launch Entourage to do a full Rebuild of its
Identity database -- about once a week.
- Delete big emails that I don't need.
- remove most any attachment larger than 50K (after saving it to HD)
- though it is sometimes trickier to remove attachments, especially
embedded images, on outbound than inbound emails.

My setup:
- current email identity is 690 MB with god-knows how many thousands of
historical (or is it hysterical?) email history messages.
- 2 GHz G5 PPC iMac
- OS X 10.4 Tiger (10.4.7),
- and all the latest Office Mac updates (Entourage is 11.2.5)

Hope this helps in some way.
I hope also that someone from Microsoft Mac Business Unit reads these and
adds the request: Improve User Interface Responsiveness.

Best,
Bruce

 

[Scott]

Some other notes that might be helpful: I run Entourage 2004 (11.2.5)
on my G5 2Ghz tower, which has 2.5 gigs of RAM. I restart my Mac often.
I check Activity Monitor, and no app is sucking up much CPU or memory.
Also: Entourage up until a few months ago, ran quite fast, fast enough
for all my needs.
I was told to turn off Spotlight (in both Spotlight and Entourage
preferences) so I've done that. I've also tossed the entourage.plst
file. I've also turned of syncing with any app. We'll see if that
improves things.

I do think I will reinstall Entourage from the Disk, just to see if the
problem lies inside the MUD somewhere, or if it could be the actual app
somehow.

 

[Diane Ross]

So the things that I do to try to keep Entourage as quick as possible:

- Periodically use Option-Launch Entourage to do a full Rebuild of its
Identity database -- about once a week.

It is a very bad idea to use the rebuild functionality when it is not
needed. If you need space on your disk or you want to get the file into
contiguous space on your disk, go ahead and use compact. Only use rebuild if
your file is damaged. (tip provided by one of the Entourage developers)

--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
The Entourage Blog lists the EHP as one of the top five Microsoft Entourage
resources.
<http://blogs.msdn.com/entourage/>

 

[Guest]

Thank you. I will amend my usual Entourage maintenance' process. --B.

 

[Scott]

After trying all of the ways I could think of to speed up Entourage
2004, I decided to try reinstalling it. So yesterday, I spent most of
the day, running Paul Berkowitz's Export-Import scripts, removing
Entourage, and then reinstalling it from the original CD.

I imported on the bare minimum things, and only about 20% of the total
emails (I'll just refer to the old Identity if I need to find the older
ones). The size of the new Identity is now 196 megs. I rebuilt most
everything, included the Rules, from scratch, to avoid copying over any
part of the problem (I know I'm way over my head here in terms of
understanding and this is all applied voodoo). I deleted all the
Projects.

The speed increases were worth it to me. Arrowing up and down through a
list of emails is now quick. All of the keyboard shortcuts that had
gone wonky on me (including Delete and New) all seem back, but it's too
early to tell if it's permanent. The best part is when I delete
something, there's not a 2-second delay anymore (that one was causing
many problems, from actions I would try to do during that delay). Also
when I click on an email now, even a complex html one, it shows up
immediately in the Preview area. Typing, forward delete and backward
delete now also keep up. There are still slight lags everywhere, but I
think this is simply because Entourage was never one of the more
lightning-fast applications. It may have always been slightly slow.
(I'm running on a Power-PC G5 tower, 2-gig, with 2.5 gigs of RAM).

I've no idea if this would help other people. The speed differences may
not be worth the hours and hours this took. For me, it was. I'm bugged
by the smallest of slowdowns.

One lingering new problem: All new messages now come in with None as
category. Even though every contact in my address book has both a
Category and a Color assigned to it. I'm not sure why this is
happening. Even if I reassign the email address to the Address book,
and attach a new color/category to it, each email continues to come
through with the None Category. So if someone knows a fix, I'm all
ears.



Couple of notes, in case somone else tries this:

·· I learned that you can't just copy Entourage over to the
Applications' folder. It won't open. You have to run the Office
Installer.

·· You also need to remove, temporarily, the MUD folder (I just
placed it on the desktop). Otherwise, opening up Entourage for the
first time gives you an error message, saying that it can't read this
version. So, you put the real MUD on the desktop. Open Entourage, which
will create a New MUD that you'll trash in a little while). Run the
Update. Restart the Mac. Throw away the New MUD (which is essentially
empty). Place your real MUD back into the root level of your Docs.
Start Entourage and it will recognize the old MUD.

·· I think you have to manually rebuild any Rules. At least that's
what I did.

·· Probably because I have all POP emails, when I ran the fresh
Entourage for the first time, over 1200 emails came into my inbox, all
that I'd read before. Not a big deal, since I just deleted them.

 

[Allen Watson]

I've found that running low on disk space can slow things down considerably,
as can having a fragmented Entourage database file. (And yes, files CAN
become fragmented on OS X.)

Running a Compact on the database periodically should produce a fresh,
contiguous copy of the file, but only if there is a large enough chunk of
contiguous free space.

Recently, everything was running slowly for me. I'm on a Macbook, 120GB
disk, 2 GB RAM, but everything was slow. I had PLENTY of free CPU time.
Watching activity monitor's disk activity display, it became evident that
the disk was the bottleneck. My free space was down to 12 GB. I moved about
20 GB off to an external drive, and ran the utility iDefrag on it. This
shaved about 2 to 3 MINUTES off the time it was taking Entourage to start up
and become available.

I'm convinced that it was getting a contiguous database, plus plenty of room
for swap files, that made the difference.