Discussion on S@H/G@H interference with Outlook

[Sisyfos]

I don't know if any of you noticed, that my Seti production suddenly dropped off aproximately a month ago?
I work at a Call Center handling business data solutions (ie non private datalinks, ISDN, ADSL etc.), actually my primary function is making network statistics but that's a long story, anyway I'm superuser deluxe, god this is being long winded...
I'm the de facto administrator, so I have access to a lot of workstations (30-40 PII/I 300-866).
I shot down Seti because it interfered with Outlook. Every 5 min? Outlook would become totally unresponsive for a period of 3-5 sec.
A few users commented on this, of course they didn't know what caused it but I knew because it happened on my own workstation too when Seti was running.
Lately I've been trying out Genome, but it seems it's doing the same thing.
If I should venture a guess it would be that the background polling of the Exchange server is freezing Outlook. Under normal circumstances this is only taking a split second, but if the polling is running at lowest priority then it may be battling S@H/G@H for CPU time.
My questions (finally) are:
Does anyone know what I'm babbling about?
Does anyone know how to circumvent the problem?

My colleagues are very dependent on Outlook and I won't let these projects be a hindrance, also it could be looked upon as counterproductive, which would forfeit my permission to run them anyway.

It sure would be a waste

Misc.:
NT 4.0
Outlook 97
S@H as service

Kim

[rocketmanx]

Yeah Kim I know what you're babbling about. I have win2k and outlook 2000 on my laptop I am using here at work and on 2 machines at home, all exhibit the same symptoms with outlook being "frozen". It happened with Seti when I ran it and G@H now.
As for the second question I believe (I'm a self-taught user-who admiinsters my own network for my business- with no programming or computer science training- just a little logic) it is more memory related as when I run a ram defrag on my laptop (384 meg ram) the problem goes away until I open other apps. Other memory intensive apps such as a Corel Draw or Photoshop graphic exhibit the same behavior. Oh-I'm running G@H as an app. not a service. Just my 2 cents for what it's worth.
Pete

[box]

I'm running Win98 + Outlook 2000 + G@H as app. here, with no problems.

Outlook running in Exchange-server mode on a 10Mbps network. The Exchange-server is Win2K Server / Exchange 5.5.

How much RAM is in your workstations?

[Sisyfos]

128 MB.
My own workstation has 256 MB.

Kim

[Jorden]

Are the Outlooks polling for new email every so many minutes? I'm running Outlook on WinME, 256Mb RAM, 2xg@h and I see the same 'problem' every x minutes I set my Outlook to check for mail.

Jord.

[Sisyfos]

VERY interesting Jord.
So Outlook does it be it in pop3 or mapi mode.
If I remember correctly (IIRC )you're on a slowish modem connection.
At my work we're connecting to the corporate Exchange servers through a router checking access lists on our IP-address and MAC-address, which could account for it being slower than standard.
At home I don't have the problem running as pop3 on ADSL.

It's a bit confusing whith Pete's experiences, but maybe the two are just different roads to the same symptom and if you're suffering from both

[rocketmanx]

It seems to be a matter of running out of sytem resources. I know on my machine that my dial-up connection (modem-) takes a lot more resources to run than does my network card (win2k server with a simple TCP/IP 100tx network). I believe Genome is a bit of a memory hog and it's definitely a cpu hog when nothing else is active. I had a dual 450 xeon 1 meg cache box that was configured identically hardware wise as my other 2 win2k machines wich are dually p3 700&550's but the xeon box (same ram in all,512mb) i could run 2 Seti clients, outlook, 2-IE windows, all with no freezing of Outlook. Sorry no answer to the problem and I probably just created more confusion, but I have tried installing the client on my workstations (all running outlook 2k/win98) but had the same problem with some apps that they run which are specific to my business. Outlook did the same , but everyone but myself and my brother are connecting through a U-gate. My only alternative has been to discontinue the client on the workstations
and run Genome on my home machines only.
Pete

[Jorden]

Well, G@H is definitely a CPU hog, for it's about the second time in 3 days I had to adjust my system clock, as it was running 10 minutes late. Maybe it's because I'm running dual g@h/GS's on a single CPU machine

Jord.

[TomNuttall]

I am also running 2 WUs on G@H on my 1 gig athlon, but my system clock has kept perfect time, for the past month 24/7.

Tom

[Jorden]

The difference Tom is, I have a P3-450 on an old Asus board

[Assimilator1]

I run Outlook + Win95b + SETI CLi +SETIQ,no probs here.
(sorry didn't have time to read whole post )

------------------
I guess I won't recruit for my team here Team Anandtech

[Sisyfos]

I'm bringing this up again as I saw it discussed at ARS.
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenT...1&m=1140916491

It's very annoying this problem.

Does anyone have anything new to add?

Kim

[Pace]

Outlook 2000, with Office 2000 Service Pack 1 installed I believe, on a Win2k SP1 box. P3 800, 256MB, on network, but Outlook checking my ISP accounts only.

No problems with 1 instance of Genome.

P.

Edit: However...I'm running Outlook in the background, so might not notice much if it doesn't respond at times.

[This message has been edited by Pace (edited 05 June 2001).]

[Pace]

And then it sent pear shaped

Just had a little pause of about 1.549 seconds, anyone see a link between these cases?

P.