I am in contact with system administrators, network administrators and email administrators from multiple corporations on a daily basis. Quite often I hear from administrators or their higher level directors that some of their applications are running slow.

We’ll start off with a series of diagnostic techniques that will include testing their network connections, verifying that all patches and updates are in place and then monitoring and measuring user response times with specific tools targeted at their applications.

Email applications such as Outlook will invariably slow down over time and often the problem is identified as a memory issue. The simplest solution is to throw more memory at the problem but that also involves more money, something that most companies try to avoid as a possible solution. Especially in these times of constrained budgets, budget cuts and longer, more involved approval cycles with lower and lower management-required-signature purchase thresholds.

So when a slow response time for an email application has been determined to be related to memory leaks it will be followed by a sigh of relief that the company will not require additional monies to correct this issue.

When an admin receives multiple notifications that Outlook has reached a high watermark with respect to their virtual memory limits then the admin can sometimes take corrective measures such as closing down more than a couple of other applications to free up that memory. Sometimes an admin may also need to disable some of the add-ins that are running in Outlook.

Some add-ins have a search capability which can gobble up memory like a hungry man on Thanksgiving. This issue can be indicative of an inefficient garbage collection process within an application and only remedied by going back to the software vendor with data and application scenario so that the vendor can reproduce the problem on their end. Most C# code is managed and garbage collected but sometimes the cleanup process may not be running as efficiently as possible. So further review of the code is needed and hence a good data set and description of the environment will help in the vendor diagnostics.

An administrator can monitor the performance of their Outlook application by shutting down all other applications and then running the performance monitoring tool from the Task Manager which will show the CPU utilization and memory usage on the Performance tab. If the Task Manager is not available to an end user then get an administrator to follow these steps:

1. Press the Ctrl-Alt-Delete key sequence simultaneously.
2. Choose Task Manager.
3. Select the Performance tab.

You can also select the Processes tab to view all CPU and memory usages per process running on the system. Selecting the CPU or Memory headings from within the Process tab will allow an administrator to monitor the usages from high to low or from low to high based on the needs of the administrator.

An administrator might want to try opening Outlook in safe mode by using the following command with the forward slash safe argument:

C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOFFICE11Outlook.exe / safe

In safe mode the add-ins are not running which is at least a workaround to allow your users to run their email application while preventing the potential issue of memory leaks. One way of determining if the add-ins are causing trouble is to start Outlook normally and then disable the add-ins one-by-one. An administrator can start Outlook, disable an add-in, restart Outlook and then monitor the memory for memory leaks. If no leaks are occurring then repeat the same procedure until an add-in has been identified. Once identified then remove that add-in permanently, install the previous add-ins and then report the problem to the respective author of the add-in.

Another diagnostic procedure to take would be to run all spyware applications and check for something out of the ordinary. This is why routine and regular maintenance of all software applications on the client is strongly recommended to prevent problems before they happen.

A less desirable approach is to completely uninstall Outlook and then re-install it so that they are operating with a clean application.

If your client is running an earlier version of Outlook such as Outlook 2000 then there was a patch (service pack 3 – SP3) which existed that fixed this memory leak problem. You can check the Microsoft Knowledge database for the following article:  http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=811167.

Good luck!