Question : MS Exchange 2007 / SBS 2008 - guidelines for email performance

I've got one of 'those' clients.

He's complaining about the performance/reliability of his Outlook 2007. I'm pretty sure it's due to the 30,000+ emails stored in a 10GB mailbox running on an single core PC over wifi but no matter how hard I try to explain, he flatly refuses to believe the amount of emails he has is very high and is convinced despite my protests that there's something wrong with either Outlook or Exchange 2007 and the problem can be fixed by just a little bit of tinkering.

He's always having long delays syncing and many times the search indexing stalls. Quite often I've had to delete the OST file and resync.

Bascially, I'm looking for anything official looking that I can wave at him that would back me up in saying he ought to do one or more of the following...

a) delete/archive the majority of his emails
b) get a new PC
c) use an ethernet cable.

I get the impression from various forums that the the number of emails stored is more relevant to performance than the amount of storage used but can't seem to find anything with cold hard facts to prove it.

I've checked the Server (Zeon X3363 @ 2.8GHx / 12GB RAM) and cpu/disk/net usage never gets too stressed so the problem seems to be at the Outlook end, not the server.

Answer : MS Exchange 2007 / SBS 2008 - guidelines for email performance

There actually is a Microsoft Knowledge Base Article, that addressess this

Here is the core part

These symptoms are most noticeable during mail delivery or during synchronization. These symptoms become more pronounced as store size increases. They are more likely to occur when the size of the .pst file or the size of the .ost file approaches 2 gigabytes (GB). Additionally, they are more pronounced in a very large .pst file or in a very large .ost file that is 4 GB or larger.

If you use a portable computer If you are using a portable computer, you may experience these problems sooner than you would on a desktop computer. This occurs because hard disks on portable computers are generally slower than hard disks on desktop computers. The performance problems are directly related to hard disk speed. If you add more random access memory (RAM) to a computer, there is no effect on this problem.

There is an update mentioned in the KB that may help slightly

Here's the link to the KB

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932086