Outlook freezes and requesting data from Exchange server

[Steven Wong]

Hi,

Occasionally through the day, my users (including myself), Outlook will
freeze for about 5-10 seconds, with a red exclamation mark on the Outlook
icon at the borrom right hand corner. If I move my cursor over the icon,
there's a tooltip saying "Outlook is requesting data from the Exchange
server".

Is this a common problem on Exchange 2003 ? because I also have this problem
in my previous jobs but had no clue as well ...

Any idea ?

AD : Windows 2003 with SP2
Exchange : Exchange 2003 with SP2
Outlook : Outlook 2003

Steven

[Mark]

Hi Steven,

Maybe one of these links on the Exchange team blog will help.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/05/25/405353.aspx
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/05/02/448809.aspx

I have recently seen similar delays where mailboxes have very high item
counts in the frequently accessed folders such as inbox and sent items.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/905803/en-us

According to that article around 5000 is the recommended limit. While I was
looking into trying to export mailbox item counts on all folders within a
mailbox (as opposed to the item count for the entire mailbox available in
Exchange System Manager and WMI) I came across this article about using
pfdavadmin that gets this straight into CSV. You might find it useful.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/04/24/438170.aspx

Hope this helps,
Thanks,
Mark.

[Martin Blackstone [MVP]]

"Steven Wong" <saza...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:OR0AXETU...@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...

> Is this a common problem on Exchange 2003 ? because I also have this
> problem in my previous jobs but had no clue as well ...
>

Sure, if your server is underconfigured, you have too many items in your
mailbox folders, etc.
But you are going to need to provide a heck of a lot more info.

Server and storage config, number of users, etc.

[Jamestechman]

Use whitepaper below focus on section "Ruling Out Disk-Bound Problems"
page 31. Also run Exchange Best Practice Analyzer to see if it
suggests any optimizations.

PhysicalDisk\Average Disk sec/Read
PhysicalDisk\Average Disk sec/Write

Troubleshooting Microsoft Exchange Server Performance
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8679f6bd-7ff0-41f5-bdd0-c09019409fc0

James Chong (MVP)
MCITP | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+,
Security+, Project+, ITIL
msexchangetips.blogspot.com

[Steven Wong]

thanks for everyone's input .. seems a lot of info and need to digest, I
will take some time to go through all of them.

thanks again

"Jamestechman" <jamest...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:468131f4-745c-4150...@c1g2000yqg.googlegroups.com...

[John Fullbright]

I'd say it's RPC latency, and 99% of the time when you see RPC latency disk
latency is the root cause. I'd chack the physical disk counters average
sec/read and average sec/write.

"Steven Wong" <saza...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:OR0AXETU...@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...

[Mark Morowczynski]

Also putting users in Cached mode will help with the performance. It
will give some relief to the disks and the users will be pulling from
the local OST file.

On Nov 30, 6:06 pm, "John Fullbright" <fjohn@donotspamnetappdotcom>
wrote:

> I'd say it's RPC latency, and 99% of the time when you see RPC latency disk
> latency is the root cause.  I'd chack the physical disk counters average
> sec/read and average sec/write.
>

> "Steven Wong" <sazab...@hotmail.com> wrote in message

[John Fullbright]

Step 1: Determine if there is a disk latency issue.
Step 2: Determine the cause of the disk latency issue if it exists.
Step 2a: Measure the load
Step 2b: Examine the design criteria and see if that matches what you
measured.
Step 2c: If the load is higher than the storage was designed to accomodate,
then determine the constituent parts of the load.

Aren't you skipping a few steps?

"Mark Morowczynski" <mark...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:c4ca1e3f-9f51-42c0...@3g2000yqs.googlegroups.com...