Some customers experience performance issues when opening other user’s calendars. A delay occurs the first time they open the calendar, but subsequent access is fine. At random times the performance issue occurs again. Here’s why this happens.
When Outlook accesses another user’s calendar, Exchange applies a view which restricts the user from viewing private items. This happens regardless of whether there are any private items or not. This process is run on, and controlled by, the Exchange server. The act of applying a view to a folder creates search folders in the Exchange store. Once the search folder has been created, it is cached for later use, which makes subsequent viewings faster.
Exchange doesn’t cache all search folders forever. Doing so would cause server-side delays since the cache folders are continuously updated by Exchange.
The number of search folders (also known as views) is defined at the store level in Exchange. The default is 11 and the best practice is to set it between 5 to 20 views, per mailstore. It’s important to note that this number is global for the mailstore and views are not shared between users.
To demonstrate, suppose John is an administrative assistant and manages 10 separate calendars. The first time he accesses each calendar, there is a delay as Exchange creates the view. After the views have been built, subsequent access is fast. Now another user, Linda, opens 6 other calendars, including the first 3 calendars that John accessed. John and Linda are in the same mailstore. In this example, calendars 1-3 are cached for Linda, 4-7 are cached for John and 8-11 are cached for Linda. John will have to wait to access to access the first calendar while the view is rebuilt for him. By increasing the number of views stored on the Exchange server to 20, this will not occur (10+6=16, which is less than 20).
The number of views stored on the Exchange server is held in the msExchMaxCachedViews attribute in AD. To adjust the value, use ADSIEdit to navigate to dn: CN=Mailbox Store,CN=Storage Group,CN=InformationStore,CN=Server NAME,CN=Servers,CN=AG Name,CN=Administrative Groups,CN=Orgname,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=Company,DC=com. Right-click the mailbox store to adjust on the right pane and edit the msExchMaxCachedViews attribute.
Setting the value too low will cause more frequent delays for users as the views are built more often. Setting the value too high will cause slow overall Exchange performance as more views are continously updated. It should never be set higher than 50.
Labels: Exchange, Outlook, troubleshooting
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