When you’re trying to contribute emails to FileSite, does time just stop for Outlook?

When there are reports of Outlook hanging/freezing, or extremely slow filing performance, after a drag-drop of multiple emails, there is a laundry list of possible factors.  Diagnosis is easier when the trouble’s readily reproducible.

Here’s how to narrow down the list of suspects

• Is the drag-drop itself simple or multi-faceted: size of emails, number of emails, attachments, and email html/plain format.
• Gather information about the particular desktop: user, the user’s active workspaces, the destination folder at the time of the hang, the number of documents set to display per-folder on that account.
• Also collect information server-side with the database: is the SQL Server running at reasonable levels on average, are there spikes at the time of the hang, are all expected indexes present and in healthy condition.  Is the email filing queue a reasonable size?  Are there errors in the email filing log or the database log file?

Stumped? Check on this suspect

There could be so many things wrong, but here’s a surprising culprit: Refresh of the currently active workspaces for that user.

If there’s an intermittent complaint about this, or a complaint coming from a limited group of people, chances are that those users work with one or more very-large workspaces… meaning, more than 3000 items contained, or even more than 10,000.

The problem will be worse if this user’s per-folder display limit is set high, like 3000, 5000, or 9999. By default, for each of those dropped emails, FileSite is refreshing all the active folders. So, if one time around, the user has seven mega-workspaces open, there’s the delay of seven times 20 drops times twenty seconds (or whatever the regular per-folder delay would be).

(update) Read this article for detailed descriptions of those refresh settings, and which ones you should consider changing.

Other Outlook failures to check on

• Check the Quick-tips for brief problem descriptions and resolutions
• Could be .NET and CLR causing failure at launch time

What next…

I can help you narrow this down. Contact me!