Outlook Performance Issues

Symptoms: Sluggish responses from Outlook after Digital-Clay is installed, or occasional freezing.

Some things to know:

ClayOutlook integrates with Outlook events and therefore runs whenever an Outlook contact/task/appointment is changed or deleted. If Outlook folders or the Outlook connection to Exchange is slow or prone to occasional slowdowns, then ClayOutlook may cause the problem to appear worse since it has to perform synchronization of data and retrieve data from Outlook/Exchange.

However, there are some background tasks as well that may affect Outlook performance:

• At startup, ClayOutlook runs several tasks such as searching for and synchronizing changes in Outlook, loading cached data, and synchronizing with ClayCentral.

• There are three background tasks that run at prescribed intervals and that access Outlook items:
  1. Checking for appointments that are now in the past and therefore need closing
  2. Checking for recurring appointments that have new upcoming instances (i.e. whether a new Digital-Clay task must be created for the recurring appointment)
  3. Checking for deleted items that haven't been placed in the Deleted Items folder

All of these tasks may cause slow or bad connections to be slower, and may occasionally affect Outlook response times when there are many items to process (especially the startup procedure).

If the problem only happens at startup or once every few days then this is to be expected.

If the problem is recurring and happens several times a day, there are several possible techniques for handling this:

• Make sure your PST/OST files are not too large. Generally, anything above 3-4 GB can start impacting performance and cause slowdowns. Check the size of your folders and files using the Mailbox Cleanup tool, and make sure you are auto-archiving old data. See also: Reduce the size of Outlook Data Files

• The same applies to folders with several thousands of items in it. For example, if you have more than 5000 Contacts, or 10000 e-mails in your Inbox.

• Lower the interval for all three background tasks mentioned previously (Tools/Options). Set each timer function to the highest amount of minutes that you can handle (depending on the function and how often you think it necessary). This can reduce the amount of background work for ClayOutlook, and/or help in cases when there are only periodical Exchange connectivity issues.

• To speed up the startup procedure and if Offline usage is not needed, disable the offline feature in ClayOutlook Login/Configure. This will skip the ClayCentral synchronization.

• Make sure ClayOutlook is the cause of the problems by disabling the add-in and working without it for a few hours. Other add-ins may also cause slowdowns, including anti-virus add-ins.

• See also: How to troubleshoot performance issues

Microsoft Exchange related issues:

• Make sure Outlook is using Cached Mode for Exchange accounts

• Move Microsoft Exchange to a faster server if possible. And make sure you are using Exchange 2007 and up which can be 10 times faster than 2003.

• Make sure you are using minimum Outlook 2003 and up which handles Exchange issues much better.

• Avoid the HTTP over RPC protocol if possible when connecting to Exchange. It is very slow and prone to disconnections.

• Check whether the connection to Exchange is the source of the problem by working offline (i.e. in Outlook 2003, switch to Offline mode in Outlook and work with it for several hours).

• In Outlook 2003, another way to check whether a freeze is due to a bad connection with Exchange is to right-click on the Outlook icon in the system tray and click on “Cancel Server Request”. If Outlook comes back to normal then ClayOutlook is not the direct cause of the problem.

• If Exchange keeps getting disconnected, this may cause occasional freezing while Outlook attempts to reconnect due to ClayOutlook background requests. Outlook usually displays Exchange connectivity in its status bar. Check for Exchange issues, server issues, and networking problems such as bad cables and wireless hardware.