Entourage frequently "stalls" for 5-15 seconds

[mrspeakers]

Entourage just stalls, all the time. I'll be typing a sentence and
bam, 5-15 seconds of the spinning ball. If I keep typing, my input
sometimes catches up when the ball stops spinning, but usually is lost.
It's incredibly annoying.

When remote, I'm currently connecting via owa, but this problem also
occured using VPN, or when on the LAN. It existed on my Powerbook G4,
and it's still there on my MacBook Pro. I have fast network
connections.

All MSFT and OSC updates are installed.

Dan

 

[Michael Rose]

Hi Dan,

We've seen several conditions that can cause Entourage to exhibit the
behaviour you describe (often referred to by our users as "the hiccup").

a) Antivirus software scanning the mail database file; Symantec AV is
particularly bad. Make sure that any AV autoscan feature excludes the
~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 Identities/ folder. You might
also exclude that folder from Spotlight access as well (it's not necessary
to scan it to use Entourage's Spotlight integration).

About 80-90% of our Entourage performance calls are linked to SAV. :-(

b) A very large message that continually tries & fails to synchronize with
the Exchange server. One of our users had a 124 MB (!) enclosure in one
message, so Entourage kept trying to download it, timed out, and tried
again. You can sort your mailbox by size, or create a custom view that
includes large messages from all folders. It may also be helpful to log into
the account with an Outlook client to see if the performance lag is there as
well, or if a large message that doesn't sync to Entourage shows up there.

c) Any process that periodically scans the hard drive (QuickSilver, A Better
Finder Launcher, KeyAccess etc.) could conceivably cause this problem if it
ran completely amuck. Check Activity Monitor to see if there's a specific
process that kicks up every time the stall occurs.

d) General Exchange mailbox corruption. If you do have F.W.O. (friends with
outlook) and can archive your mail in a .pst file, do it & ask your Exchange
administrator to delete and recreate your account, then import the .pst back
into your Exchange folders. This is a fairly blunt instrument and a pain in
the neck, but sometimes does help.

e) Way out in left field: a corrupt font. Try creating a new user on your
Mac and setting up Entourage & your Exchange account in the new user space.
If there's a font (or other preference/library setting) that is unique to
your OS X user and causing a problem, the stall should go away; that would
give you another avenue for troubleshooting.

Good luck,
--Mike

 

[mrspeakers]

a helped, the pauses are shorter and less frequent, moving Entourage
back into the useful zone.

Thanks...

Dan

 

[FarmerBob]

Mine started this same behavior after the 11.2.3 update. Prior to the
update, Entourage was my best application. I had NO problems. Now it
sucks. I have stalls and hesitations all the time, plus crashes with
error reports to MS at least 5 times a day, plus database corruption
billion fold more than before. I just hope that they are paying
attention to the reports.

I pray that MS is on this and that the next very soon released update
fixes all the problems. I will have to find another email client very
soon if this isn't taken care of.

As far as all the well intended suggestions to do this and do that - IT
WILL NOT WORK! If you updated to 11.2.3 and/or are running Mac OS
10.4.5+. You hung yourself the second that you updated.

The only way to get back to a working version is to revert to the
previous version. BUT since 11.2.3 altered the database, we're stuck.
End of story.

 

[Steve Hearn]

a) Antivirus software scanning the mail database file; Symantec AV is
particularly bad. Make sure that any AV autoscan feature excludes the
~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 Identities/ folder. You might
also exclude that folder from Spotlight access as well (it's not necessary
to scan it to use Entourage's Spotlight integration).

How/where do you set this pref for Spotlight?

------------------------------------------------
Steve Hearn
:: FileMaker 7 & 8 Certified Developer ::
Manager, FileMaker Development
CoreSolutions Development Inc.
Web Site: http://www.coresolutions.ca
London: (519) 641-7727 - Toronto: (416) 410-8649

 

[Barry Wainwright [MVP]]

How/where do you set this pref for Spotlight?

In the system prefs, under the spotlight pane you can add locations that are
not indexed. Drag the MUD folder to that window and it will not be scanned
by spotlight.

Note that this does NOT prevent spotlight from indexing your mail, since th
especial MDI importer creates some 'pointer' files for each email, and these
are stored where spotlight can index them.

So, by excluding the MUD folder from the spotlight indexing routines, you
can prevent spotlight itself from trying to extract data directly out of the
database - not that it could get anything meanigful out of it, but it could
waste some time & resources trying to scan a multi-gigabyte file

 

[Eric Tiffany]

I've been seeing this too, and I don't have Antivirus sw, Exchange, or bad
fonts.

However, what I have seen is that the "Microsoft Database Daemon" is "not
responding" (i.e., red in the Activity Monitor). It doesn't seem to be
hammering the processor, it's just stuck somehow. This only started
recently, after the Quicktime 7.1 and the recent Security Update.

ET

 

[jdj1974]

I've also found that Entourage stalls when trying to display an HTML
message (e.g. a newsletter), even if it's already displayed it before
(is there cache in Entourage?). This seems to be a recent phenomenon as
I've been using Entourage for years and never seemed to notice it. But
I can't pinpoint any changes that may have precipitated this hiccuping.