Outlook - Growing Memory until minimized, in the Application Installation & Compatibility forum on BrianMadden.com

Hi all.

I am having a very annoying issue with Outlook 2003 regarding memory. As you browse through your emails etc you can see the memory usage in Outlook growing and growing until you minimize Outlook where you see 70% ish of the used memory free up and as you continue to use Outlook it grows again.

This is causing some serious performance problems on my Terminal Servers. Specs below

6 x HP DL380 G4 ( dual 3.6 MB Cache)
4Gb Ram
2 x 72Gb raid 1
GB Nics
etc etc

Approx 24 users per box using a pub desktop running general office apps, IE etc. Nothing scary.. outlook always the higest process regarding memory.

I am using Office 2003 with patches as of mid march. Can provide a list if needed.

After lots of seraching on the net i have found a few postings but nothing of much use. Sure they all say check spyware, AV, add-ins etc. I have removed all of these and memory still grows. Infact same happens on a XP Pro workstation.

Now obvisouly Outlook will always grow in memory but i am seeing it grow to well over 100MB a user which is a little high..

Anyone got any bright ideas?

Many thanks

Carl

Are you actually experiencing performance issues? Windows, by default, will use as much memory as it can until it hits around 80% usage then it will start paging out. What you are seeing with the minimizing is also completely normal, every single windows appliation does this. The application is flushing any unused working set memory to the pagefile and keeping only that memory which is actually in use in memory.

[quote=Carl Huelin]Hi all.

I am having a very annoying issue with Outlook 2003 regarding memory. As you browse through your emails etc you can see the memory usage in Outlook growing and growing until you minimize Outlook where you see 70% ish of the used memory free up and as you continue to use Outlook it grows again.

This is causing some serious performance problems on my Terminal Servers. Specs below

6 x HP DL380 G4 ( dual 3.6 MB Cache)
4Gb Ram
2 x 72Gb raid 1
GB Nics
etc etc

Approx 24 users per box using a pub desktop running general office apps, IE etc. Nothing scary.. outlook always the higest process regarding memory.

I am using Office 2003 with patches as of mid march. Can provide a list if needed.

After lots of seraching on the net i have found a few postings but nothing of much use. Sure they all say check spyware, AV, add-ins etc. I have removed all of these and memory still grows. Infact same happens on a XP Pro workstation.

Now obvisouly Outlook will always grow in memory but i am seeing it grow to well over 100MB a user which is a little high..

Anyone got any bright ideas?

Many thanks

Carl[/quote]

We have the same issue. We use Windows 2003 standard server with all SP's and patches. We have Citrix 4.0 with all rollups and fixes. As Office platform we have the Dutch 2003 version also with all updates and patches till last friday (we did a complete update on the two servers).

When a user starts Outlook, the memory runs up to 60 - 100mb. If he minimalizes, the memory goes down to 3 - 9mb. When he maximalizes, the memory goes to 20 - 30mb. With every mail you open, it grows a little larger. But when you minimalize again, it goes back to 3 - 9mb and when you maximalize, you still save some mb's.

Since our servers are low on memory (they are installed with 4GB of ram) we would like to save every mb.

Is there a way to minimalize and maximalize at startup? We only have published applications. This way we save about 40mb per user. With 25 users per server, it 1GB of free memory extra.

This issue is not specific to Terminal Server environments, but is certainly compounded with multiple users. We see Outlook's memory footprint behave the same way on the desktop and in Citrix sessions. Here is a Microsoft article that describes the symptoms, but no resolution is proposed, apart from avoiding large .PST files. They seem to imply this is a "by design" feature.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827310

Hi Carl,

You might want to try out this utility I wrote today that automatically minimizes inactive Outlook windows every 60 seconds (you can control the time interval). It's called AutoMinimizeOutlook.exe: http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2009/11/autominimizeoutlookexeworkaround-for.html

Jon

Hi Carl,

Does your server lag when you have outlook maximized? If it does then you really have to check for viruses and spywares, I would assume you are being attacked by a worm or some sort. If it does not lag, then its completely normal, when a windows application is minimized it frees up the memory usage.