Entourage 2008 stalling on actions for long periods of time

[Aymerik]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: intel
Email Client: imap

Hello,

I just upgraded to Entourage 2008 from 2004, and I am having a ton of freezing issues with Entourage.

The freezes will occur on little things like moving a message from the inbox to a folder, filtering per subject or sender (even in folders with only a few hundred messages), clearing the filter field, selecting a folder, and other actions.

The stalls ranges from 30 seconds to upwards of 30 minutes. Generally, they are in the 5-15 minute range.

While Entourage is stalled, it no longer responds to any input. Windows can't be moved, selected, etc., and command-tabbing into it does nothing. Normally dynamic interface elements like the message download progress bar & count also freeze and do no update while Entourage is stalled.

My Entourage database is big (~11.8 GB), but it's no bigger than it was in Entourage 2004, and I wasn't having these sorts of issues. (Though I was having other issues, like very frequent db corruption).

I have about 6 GB of free HD space on my 150 GB drive.

I'm not using Sync services at this point due to the duplicate calendar event madness with iCal, nor have I turned on Spotlight indexing within Entourage.

Anyone else having similar issues? Entourage is almost unusable due to the frequency of the stalling at this point.

Thanks,
-Aymerik

 

[William Smith]

Hi Aymerik!

My comments are inline with yours...

The freezes will occur on little things like moving a message from
the inbox to a folder, filtering per subject or sender (even in
folders with only a few hundred messages), clearing the filter field,
selecting a folder, and other actions.

Keep a close eye on how much mail you have in your Inbox or in
sub-folders of your Inbox.

The Inbox folder is synchronized more frequently than others because it
is where all new mail must come before being sorted or filed elsewhere.
Move any sub-folders out of the Inbox and get it down to as few messages
as possible.

I have about 6 GB of free HD space on my 150 GB drive.

This is not good. Ideally, at minimum 10% of your hard drive should be
empty to allow the Mac OS X operating system room to work. You have less
than 5% free.

You also do not have room to rebuild your database should it become
corrupt. If you ever need to rebuild it then you'll need at least twice
the amount of space that your Database is using (22GB).

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

 

[randy]

I'm pretty much experiencing the same Entourage issues as Aymerik. I
upgraded this week from a Powerbook to a MacBook, from Panther to
Leopard (skipping Tiger), and from Office 2004 to 2008. This has to
be one of my more jarring upgrades (Mac user since '85), but Entourage
has to be the worst of it.

Just this morning I consulted:
http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/Entourage/
(search "slow")
and
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/performance.html

I applied the first suggestion from the 2nd site. I think its written
for Tiger, so to exclude identities in Leopard go to System
Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy. This seemed to help some, but
still nowhere near as responsive as 2004. Calendar is the worst, and
not only do I give it it's own window (something I've always done),
but I NEVER switch modes in this window. Instead I use my main Mail
window to switch modes such as getting to my Address Book.

Somewhere in that first site it was mentioned the MS was aware of the
Entourage/Leopard delays. Let's hope they give us a good update.

P.S. I thought my mail db was big at 3 Gb.

 

[Diane Ross]

I applied the first suggestion from the 2nd site. I think its written
for Tiger, so to exclude identities in Leopard go to System
Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy.

I also suggest not letting Time Machine backup your Identity. Exclude the
Identity folder from Time Machine options. If your Entourage Identity is
backup during use the backup could be corrupt. Daily backups of your
Identity can eat away at your Time Machine drive available space. See these
articles on alternative methods.

Entourage and Time Machine (creates chronological backup of Identity can be
used by both Tiger and Leopard)

<http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/01/entourage_and_time_machine.html>

Alternative method to use Entourage and Time Machine (does a once a day or
whatever time period you select)

<http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/01/alternative_method_to_use_entourage_
and_time_machine.html>

Calendar is the worst, and
not only do I give it it's own window (something I've always done),
but I NEVER switch modes in this window. Instead I use my main Mail
window to switch modes such as getting to my Address Book.

Known issue, it's flagged messages that is causing the problem. One user
reported:

At one point I had about 2000, and would get stuck for 5-6 minutes. I
unflagged most of them, but I still have a couple hundred, They now slow me
down to about 30 seconds switching to calendar.
=========================================================
SUMMARY: What other users have reported that helped them
=========================================================
Slow, slow, slow.....

Fix for me was to delete 100% of the Microsoft prefs and the .dotm/Normal
file, then restart. Problem gone.

========
One thing you can do is to disable the "what you see is what you get" font
menus. Go to Entourage > Preferences, and then, under "General
Preferences", click "General" in the left pane. Uncheck the box for
"WYSIWYG font menu". That will disable the preview of what the fonts look
like in the Font menu, but it should appear faster as a result.
==========
Use Linotype FontExplorer X (which is a free download). Do a "Clean System
Fonts Folders" which cleans out any fonts not installed by the Mac OS X
Installation (i.e. ones you install yourself) and puts them in a folder on
your desktop to do with what you want.
================
In my case, bringing up the Activity Viewer had the Word application "Not
Responding", due to an out of control FontAgent Pro. Running "Uninstall
FontAgent Pro" solved the problem, and now the mini is snappy also - about 2
second every time for all the Office Apps.

=============
It sounds like you're running with too little memory for what you're doing.
Which means that in general the situation you're describing IS happening but
not to things you can deal with but with the Virtual Memory system. What you
describe can happen when the memory system is constantly having to unload
from and load into memory from the disk drive.

Have you run Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder? And have you
watched the value for Free when the System Memory tab (at the bottom) is
selected. From what I've seen when this number gets below 50MB the system
will start to slow down. When it gets down to 20MB or 10MB you get what you
call Beachballitis.

They only real cure is to run fewer programs or buy more memory.
============================
John McGhie's tips:

You may wish to try this:

1) Quit all Microsoft applications.

2) Track down all instances of pre-2008 Normal template on your computer,
and drag them to your desktop. The file is called simply "Normal" and has
no extension.

3) Find and drag the file Normal.dotm to your desktop. Unless you have
moved it, it should be in
/Users/ ~ /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/

4) If the following files exist, Remove or rename them:

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (10)

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (11)

User/Library/Preferences/com.Microsoft.Word.plist

User/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008 (the whole folder!)

5) Now re-start Word 2008 and it should be OK.

Be thorough with this, if you leave any of these files behind Word 2008 will
find them and won't replace them. Do it right and Word will construct a
new, clean, set of preferences and everything should now work.

 

[Diane Ross]

This is not good. Ideally, at minimum 10% of your hard drive should be
empty to allow the Mac OS X operating system room to work. You have less
than 5% free.

Totally agree with Bill, this could be the source of all of your problems.

 

[SCukier]

I had a similar problem w/Entourage 2008 using a 2003 Exchange server. In my
instance, we were getting the colored beach ball every several minutes on a
6GB mailbox. The user could not work in a timely manner. Turns out our DNS
settings on the client were incorrect. I made the correction and added the
domain to the domain list and like magic, problem gone.

Hope this helps.

 

[Aymerik]

Thank you everyone for the input.

A few more data points:
-I now have ~18 GB free space on my HD, and still having the same issues even when the only open apps are Entourage 08 and Safari.

I have 2 GB of RAM, and am on a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo. Again, Entourage 04 was not having the same sorts of stall issues even when I had Safari, Word, Excel, PowerPoint (all v2004), and a few other apps open.

I don't use WYSIWYG menus, don't Spotlight index Entourage messages from inside Entourage or from the Spotlight control panel, don't use Time Machine, and don't sync with .Mac, iCal, or any other choice within sync services.

My DNS info is up to date, and my Internet connections are fine. The problems occur regardless of whether I am at home on a DSL line, at the office with a substantial pipe, or on an EVDO-REV A network. It's really just Entourage trying to think that is causing issues, not it trying to reach the network.

I'm not even seeing a beachball when I mouse over to Entourage as it's stalled. This goes way beyond beachballitis.

-Moving messages from one folder to another usually but not always causes the stalls

-setting flag seems to always cause a stall.

 

[randy]

Update on progress on my end: I deleted all my red "To Do" flags, and
now Entourage 2008 is almost as zippy as Entourage 2004. As a
substitute visual indicator in lieu of flags, I edited one of the
"Categories" to serve this purpose. I chose Red -- which colors a
message's From/To, Subject, Date . . . headings in Entourage's
folders -- which visually stands out more for me than a flag.
Searching by category or reordering by category is the equivalent to
searching/reordering by flags.* So far the only downside I've
discovered is that flagged items automatically show up in your My Day
(a function I don't use anyway).

*To replace Flags with a Category:
1. Search (all folders) for flags.
2. Select all flagged messages, apply category.
3. Select all flagged messages, remove flags.

Steps 2 and 3 create delays/freezing because they're editing flagged
messages. In fact I'd force quit in step #2, but on reopenning
Entourage, I see all my flagged messages colored. You can elminate
one delay by doing #3 ahead of #2 (editing flagged messages once, then
coloring nonflagged messages). But I wanted to double-check that all
my flagged messages were colored before removing the flags.