Sync is slow and VCO Calendar App is slow, why?

[Product Manager]

Symptoms:

• Sync slow with several long stops during sync events process.
  
• Start VCO Calendar, it's slow and takes more than 10 seconds (1 minute) to load the events.
  
• In VCO Calendar Menu -> select Refresh, once done, navigation from date to date is effectively quicker.

Cause:

You may hit a known issue which due to the exception instances of recurring events. For some customers they used other sync software tool before, those sync software create an individual exception event in Outlook for every single recurring instances even they are not exception events. E.g., for a daily event last for 10 years, they will create about ~3500 exceptions records in Outlook. If you have a lot of recurring events and use this kind of software to sync with your Outlook, you will create a lot of exception records in your Outlook and you Outlook file will be big. You may not notice this on your PC as the PC is more powerful than your mobile phone.

For some cases, each single recurring event contains ~2000 exceptional instances and they have a lot of recurring events. This fill up the memory and causing VCO crashed and very slow.

For VCO, we sync recurring pattern and exception instances to VCO. If you have a recurring event, no matter how many recurring instances, we only create one record in database. For example, if you have a daily recurring event with two exceptional instances, we treat it as three records. We believe this is more effective way to handle the recurring events. You won't create ~1000 exceptions instances manually. But some sync software can easily do that. 

We cannot say which method is better. The sync software is optimized for the way they store the records, for these cases, it causes trouble to VCO.

Solution

The solution is to recreate those recurring events and sync to VCO again. Here are the steps that you can consider.

1. Assume Outlook is the master copy..           
   
2. Backup Outlook.
   
3. In VCO Settings, select “Delete synced events when reset”. 
   
4. Then, click the “Reset” button, and select “Reset Calendar App Only”. This will delete all the events in VCO and linked events in Android Calendar.
   
5. In Outlook, sort the events by recurring type (Outlook Calendar -> View -> Current View -> By Category, click the left most icon in the title to sort the events by icon. The recurring events will be sorted in front of the non-recurring events). Then, create a sub folder, and move all these recurring events to the sub folder.
6. Sync VCO with Outlook again. This time, the sync will run much faster. The VCO Calendar will load faster too (In general, the VCO Calendar should not take more than 2 sec to load)
   
7. If the steps above fix the sync and VCO calendar issue, you can follow the steps below to sync the recurring events.
   

Options 1

1. Recreate the recurring events in Outlook default folder one by one, and then sync with VCO

or

2. Move the recurring events back to Outlook default folder, and then update the recurring pattern e.g. change start date or end date of the recurring pattern (When you edit the recurring pattern,  Outlook will delete all the exception events and recreate the recurring events.) Then sync with VCO again.