Very slow Outlook performance with large mailbox

[nedstar1]

Hi friends,

I am running Exchange 2003 on SBS 2003 - all patched up to SP2 on both counts. I have a user - one of my bosses - who has in the past demanded access to all of her emails, going back for years. She is constantly reviving sales and presentation projects, and having access to emails from as far back as 2003 has been a huge boon to her efforts. Her email account has now grown to a truly bloated 12,331,490 KB. Her outlook inbox, not counting subfolders, as 12000 unread emails and measures nearly 4GB all by itself. She got a blackberry device and reads most of her email on that, leaving the unread to pile up until she can sort thourhg it - which is a few times a year.

Well, this was fine for a long time - this method allowed her to reach what she wanted, when she wanted it. Sometime back, she was complaining of outlook performance on her P3 900 laptop with 512MB of RAM. I got her a Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM - problem solved. For about four months.

Her outlook performance is unbelievably slow, taking up to five minutes to simply move from one email to another.

My thoughts are as follows:
I would like to move her subfolder groups off the server and into local archive folders - PSTs - and set up rules to automatically archive emaisl from these folders, as well as rules that she can run manually on her desktop to sort out emails from her inbox - I'm afraid if I have them sort out on the server, she won't be able to access them on her BB.

I know how to do this, and I can provider her with remote desktop access so that she can search her email if need be. What I need is some feedback on whether my proposed method is a good idea or not - or if there are better ways to improve outlook performance. Links to resources are just as good as straight answers.

Any advice is very welcome and much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Ned

 

[RichardHuang]

I don't know if Cached mode will help in this case. But archiving her emails is the way to go. One thing you need to consider is to backup her local archived emails in case her local Harddisk is gone...

 

[skialta]

I've read in the past that if you have more than around 1000 items in your Inbox you'll have performance issues. Personally it seems that if you have around 3-5k items in your inbox, you'll start to have performance issues. The best thing to do is to move as much of the mail into subfolders and the performance issues should go away. I've also seen issues with a BES that if you have a TON of unsorted emails in the inbox, the BES may choke.

 

[xmsre]

If the mail is required, leave it on the server in managed storage. PST's don't have a place in a business environment. If the mail is not required for any business objective, don't give her the space. Make her justify, and pay for, the extra exchange server capacity, backup capacity, datacenter space, IT staff, etc. through a charge back to her department.


Let's assume all that mail is business critical and meets a business objective and the cost of maintaining it is paid.

1. MS recommends no more than 5000 items per default folder. Going over that number can have severe performance reprecussions. Have the user reorgainize her mail in such a way that it meets the MS recommendation.

2. COnsider archiving solutions, this way the mail is off the exchange server but still in managed storage.

3. Definitely set her client up to use cached mode. This will shift the bulk of read activity to her local OST and off the exchange server.

Here is the MS reference to give the user:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905803/en-us

When she put in a ticket, see check to see if she has complied, if not, mark the status - awaiting user action -

 

[58sniper]

>1000 items in any of the "main" Outlook folders causes a significant performance hit.

Archiving solutions, as mentioned above, are certainly a good idea.

Cached mode might work, but keep a couple of things in mind:
The initial sync will take forever.
That's 12GB+ of space that will be used on the client workstation.
Regardless of cached mode or not, the number of items in the main folders still impacts performance.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP

 

[ntinlin]

Why not move the old stuff to a public folder?

Archiving solutions are good but cost money and extra management time.

Neill

 

[xmsre]

58Sniper - I'd personally out the number lower. There's no mention of views in the article either other than item count, but if you have more than 11 views, each time you browse a folder it has to create the view on the fly - a significant performance hit. The article should be enough to push the problem back on the user's plate.

ntinlin - all you do then is move the problem - not resolve it. You need the user to resolve the issue and clean up after themself. Reorganizing into multiple folders with a lower item count per folder will go a long way. Independent of where on exchange the mail is, it takes up space. Most archiving solutions archive to a volume on cheaper SATA disk.

 

[ntinlin]

xmsre - Mail or public folder does indeed take up space on server either way. But original question was about Outlook client slowness not space issues.

And surely putting in a full archiving solution for just one person, who would obviously demand that everything was kept for ever anyway, would be overkill?

I agree with you wholeheartedly that the user does need to meet Ned half way by being a lot more organised.

 

[nedstar1]

Hello everyone.

Thanks for the great responses. As I read this, my plan is developing. My boss got a blackberry device about ten months ago, and is glued to it.

Since then, she hasn't done much sorting of her inbox - she reads almost everything in real time on the blackberry (even at her desk). She has extensive subfolders, and we used to have sorting rules to organize them automatically. I have suggested to her that we immediately reinstate some sorting rules, but she has yet to respond to the email - it's become one of the 14000 unread.

I am not familiar with the so-called archive solutions. Can anyone point me to an FAQ or product page so I can look these over? We're only going to generate more email, and my bosses aren't shy about paying for the IT experience they want - I've kind of spoiled them I think.

As an aside, I also need to find some means to measure the cost of data retention - how is this done, or is that a topic for another forum?

Thanks everyone for the input. I'll post back in a few days with the results of the sorting, so hopefully this thread could be useful to someone else as well.

Cheers, and thanks again.

Ned

 

[ntinlin]

Archiving solutions:-

Various ones out there.
GFI Mail Archiver
Sherpa Software E-Mail Attender
Symantec Enterprise Vault

IT Pro magazine had a comparison of various ones a while back.

Neill

 

[xmsre]

ntinlin

I think management of the mailbox folders will go a long way to resolving the current issue. My post contained the references needed to pursue that. Archiving is a forward looking solution for the entire org.