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.

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