I have a user who is having problems with outlook. Its freezing when it syncs with the server and her productivity is way down because of it. I understand there are a lot of factors that affect this. For instance. She is on a VPN. That alone could be the cause of a lot of issues. Lets pretend for a minute that she is in the office having the same issue. She is on a gigabit network. The issue could be caused by how the server is configured. but only if everyone else is having the problem. This is not the case.
I decided it would be a good idea to use sxmboxexp to export her Email and re-import it into her account. The backup takes 5 hours. I expected that. Here is the command I used:
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sxmboxexp -u "Laura Petrie" -a lpetrie.mbox --listlevel folderI wanted to test to see that the backup was successful by importing it into a test email account. I created a test account called "Test Petrie" and I began the mbox import using this command.
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sxmboxexp -u "Laura Petrie" -a lpetrie.mbox --listlevel folderI woke up this morning expecting the command prompt or at least being close to finishing. I saw no folders listed. This concerned me as I felt after 5 hours I should see what folders have been imported. While the import was running I decided to start SAC to see how much data was in the test mail box. I was fearing that it had not even started importing. After all her backed up mail store is 19GB. It showed at over 4.8GB had been imported into the account. I thought wow that is really slow. I also determined that this method is going to take 4 times as long as I estimated to get her Email backup and running if I follow through with this procedure.
I decided to start another terminal session and run top to see how busy the server is. It showed that the processor as essentially idle at around .5% with occasional jumps to 5 and 10%. That looked ok, but why is this taking so long? As I watched I saw several processes kicked off by the scalix server. A couple of processes called index.browse, and 10 processes called pdf2text.
I wonder why these processes are being kicked off by the server. Are these processes used by the server for indexing?
Is the Scalix server converting all this users PDF attachments to text or is this part of the indexing process and the users data is not touched?
Is there any way of speeding this up?
If this issue I am having is really only with Outlook and Smartcache, how can I prevent the smartcache from getting corrupt?
I have one other user that is experiencing the pausing while syncing issue. His problem only occurs first thing in the morning and he is fine the rest of the day. His laptop is a new laptop, with the smartcache recently rebuilt. I also am fearing that his problem will slowly degrade over time and not get better. I personally don't have the problem.
Using the webmail interface on the "Laura Petrie" account only results in the mailserver from timing out Firefox or Internet explorer reports that the script is taking to long to respond and asks me if I want to stop it. The reason I decided to try this route, is I have been running maintenance command line maintenance against the account, its a script that rebuilds the imap-cache, it will fix it for a week or two maybe go as long as a month then the problem will re-appear again. This is why I decided to try this route. Fortunately I have not deleted the users mail account yet, so I can stop this process and try something else. Again this is only a test to see if I could resolve her problem.
I know this is a lot to consider and there are a lot of factors in play here. Can anyone provide some in site as to what is happening so I can properly resolve this users issues?
Thanks for your help
Sideband Samurai