10 ms·

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically ba

by iamben 5y ago

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
If I were to guess and remember my time working at a 'hot desking' company, it's because on login, the user's profile will be copied from a central server onto the local system. I found out this is a thing when Chrome and Firefox started to put their files in the user's home directory by default. If that has to traverse a network - and who knows where all that data is coming from or how fast the internet connection is - that can take a long time.
- iamben 5y ago
  Interesting. So potentially downloading the entire browser cache each time? Goodness.
  - Yoric 5y ago
    I remember "fixing" the university's computers by preventing the browser cache from being downloaded. at every Windows startup. That was maybe 15 years ago?
  - JackFr 5y ago
    Even better - Java devs who use the default settings for Maven will have their entire local repo copied over the network. At my company people would remotely log in on Sunday evenings to avoid the hou long wait while a few hundred gigs get copied across the network. Why not chnage the location of the local repo, you ask? Of course our machines are locked down and we have no access to the local drive...
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    That's the difference between %APPDATA% (AppData/Roaming) and %LOCALAPPDATA% (AppData/Local). Caches should go into local appdata, or %TEMP% if you're feeling spicy.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  There's a few ways to set up profiles in Windows, and most of them are terrible. If you have the joy of stepping into a network with roaming profiles enabled, you will discover it takes years to untangle. The idea that you can log into any PC and your local desktop and documents all appear seems really nice, but the implementation weeds are nasty: I tell people to store things they want to access on multiple computers on a network share, and we replicate basically nothing between client PCs. Outlook also likes to download a large chunk of a user's mail archive locally each time you open it on a PC, but you can configure it a bit, and Outlook generally "works fine" while downloading. I suspect it gets hairier at DOD scale though.
  - thereddaikon 5y ago
    Onedrive has helped a lot. But only if you can make your users actually use Onedrive. More likely they invent some asinine workflow and save their documents in the most illogical places that will never get synced and you never manage to catch. Also causes problems when trying to recover data from corrupted user profiles.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  In my experience, this is a huge factor. They would probably be better off with remote desktop environments.
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
It could be related to >Currently the service uses both McAfee and Tanium software packages to scan and protect service-issued endpoints like laptops. But the computing power required by multiple programs often interferes with the user’s work, and damages the user experience, or UX.
- iamben 5y ago
  I read that - but 80 minutes felt extreme.
colechristensen 5y ago
I’m assuming just still using computers that were really cheap a decade ago and then loading them with modern bloated software and security scanning tools. Probably lots of memory swapping and trying to do a lot on a computer that can’t.
StillBored 5y ago
Not, specifically but the article mentions at the end that the original laptops used for the win10 transition were using HD's (aka spinning rust) rather than SSDs because it was a lowest bidder situation. Given what I've seen of corp/gov IT, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the "security software" (aka virus scanners, intrusion detection, etc) then proceeds to hammer the disk/CPU sufficiently that the machine cannot make forward progress. My wife's work machine (a fairly nice, if slim dell) sits there with one of its 4 cores at 100% running a McAfee process hammering the disk doing some kind of scan pretty much 100% of the time. The result is that it pushes that core to max turbo, overheats the system and then throttles the whole thing to ~800Mhz. It then takes a minute or two to open word/etc. And that is with a fairly fast SSD, add in the spinning rust, and i'm sure it would take much longer. And of course its locked down sufficiently that its not possible to even try and fix it.
- muttled 5y ago
  I've ran into issues on Lenovo computers where there's a shared power allocation for turbo boost and the GPU. Disabling turbo boost fixes issues where there's not enough power for the GPU and also helps keep the computer from going through a turbo boost/heat up/thermal throttling/turbo boost cycle.
- agentdrtran 5y ago
  The article mentions they use TWO different, heavy endpoint solutions. I'm shocked the computers work at all.
  - Moru 5y ago
    Haha, I just (as in 20 min ago) helpled a friend get their computer to work and they had 3 antiviruses running. It's a pretty common problem actually, helped a few people with it the last 20 years.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
easton 5y ago
I worked at a internship one time where by the end of the two month stint my machine would take upwards of 45 minutes to login because there was something that was running on login that had to timeout (because it was broken). Sometimes IT pushes policies that conflict with other stuff and rarely do they check every configuration (or setup alerting for these bad cases). There's lots of reasons it can happen though (especially on Windows, where the mood for 20 years was "cram it all into apply on login GPOs and scripts"). My guess in this case since the machine costs $109 (used, I assume), is that it is running spinning rust and 4GB of RAM, which on Windows 10 isn't a lot of fun. Couple that with all the security crap the DoD has to put on there (which probably spends half its time trying to grab resources from the other security software) and I could definitely see an hour.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  > Couple that with all the security crap the DoD has to put on there (which probably spends half its time trying to grab resources from the other security software) Corporate spyware is a huge impact to performance, particularly if you have an HDD. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen a computer start to lock up because some security software needs to absolutely abuse the disk.
  - cnasc 5y ago
    A “boon” is something that is helpful, not detrimental
    - the_only_law 5y ago
      Edited
  - muttled 5y ago
    I'm in security, and one thing I always try to stress is that if the security software is causing work stoppages, it should be treated with the same importance as an outage. Just as you wouldn't tolerate an internet connection that went down all the time. Outages from security measures are still outages.
hammock 5y ago
Could be handshake/sync. Could also be indexing (which doesnt prevent Outlook from loading but practically can prevent you from using it if you can't search, etc)
rvba 5y ago
Maybe Russian AND Chinese spyware on a Windows XP machine trying to open current version of outlook that is unoptimized for old computers.
pfortuny 5y ago
If your windows desktop is “shared” between computers in a domain, and the computer you are logging in is old, you are doomed.
Cromation 5y ago
Currently a Air National Guardsmen. I've only had it take that long a handful of times. Usually when it does it is running Microsofts Endpoint Manager and trying to push updates, Scan with McAfee and Tanium, and loading a bunch of scripts in the background that are checking for compliance, setting a default AF or local Comm Squadon background, posting messages relating to the current security levels, etc. Its alot to all run as soon as booted and some things could and should be delegated for off hours but its not how its currently set. Typically the first 30 minutes of my morning is waiting for Outlook, Edge/Chrome, and Teams to open before even trying to open any tools. Also from working in Comm I've seen how they purchase hardware and its pretty frustrating. They will purchase 100 laptops at the end of the year to fill their budget for hte year, but its the lowest priced laptop, which is still almost double or triple what you can purchase it for as a civilian, then often times it will sit in storage and no one will touch it. This often happens due to the leadership not having any actual IT knowledge and they make the purchasing calls so performance isnt at the forefront of their mind.
- bityard 5y ago
  I was active duty AF 20-some years ago. It's sad to see that absolutely nothing has changed.
  - callalex 5y ago
    That’s not true, they’re burning even MORE of our money now!
- iamben 5y ago
  Oof. Miserable. Thanks for an "I'm living this right now" reply! Appreciated!
- mxuribe 5y ago
  Great, our military uses Teams; now I know we're doomed. Kidding, just kidding! Seriously now...Hearing the pain here frustrates me because i am actually in favor of paying my taxes because i know when handled properly then roads, bridges, infrastructure, other things, and yes, the right tools for our military are done then everyone benefits...but when things are not managed right, it chafes me so much because the pain ripples all the way through from civil servants unable to do their job, to military folks not having tools to help defend us, to civilians being put at risk while going over unsafe bridges, to commerce not being efficient because roads suck, etc.
jerf 5y ago
In addition to the other totally accurate answers, you can also buy machines that don't have enough RAM, then mandate a software suite that is guaranteed to push the entire machine hip deep into swap merely by booting to the desktop. Every application opening then is a trial of Windows swapping bits of other things out, to load a bit of the application, then having to swap back in the two virus scanners and the malware shield to check the application just loaded, then swap back out those things to load the next resource for the application, then the checkers back in, then the program opens a network address so the network firewalls need to swap in... on an SSD this is slow, on a hard drive you can easily end up in the hours to load a program like this. Scanning through the replies, I'll also add that if you are loading your entire profile from the network, this often becomes much more problematic than the IT people may have initially calculated, because even if you can transfer a gigabyte in 10 seconds, you can't transfer a gigabyte in 10 seconds to thousands of users simultaneously, and logins are highly temporally correlated. It doesn't take much at all to have a cascading network failure as a result, even under perfect conditions, as that 10 second window becomes a 20 second window, which catches ten more people and it turns into a 40 second window, and it explodes quite fast from there as suddenly everyone everywhere is waiting for minutes or hours to load from the same overloaded profile server(s). From what I've witnessed of this, what you'll get is a number of these answers operating at once.

by iamben 5y ago

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

If I were to guess and remember my time working at a 'hot desking' company, it's because on login, the user's profile will be copied from a central server onto the local system. I found out this is a thing when Chrome and Firefox started to put their files in the user's home directory by default. If that has to traverse a network - and who knows where all that data is coming from or how fast the internet connection is - that can take a long time.

iamben 5y ago
Interesting. So potentially downloading the entire browser cache each time? Goodness.
- Yoric 5y ago
  I remember "fixing" the university's computers by preventing the browser cache from being downloaded. at every Windows startup. That was maybe 15 years ago?
- JackFr 5y ago
  Even better - Java devs who use the default settings for Maven will have their entire local repo copied over the network. At my company people would remotely log in on Sunday evenings to avoid the hou long wait while a few hundred gigs get copied across the network. Why not chnage the location of the local repo, you ask? Of course our machines are locked down and we have no access to the local drive...
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  That's the difference between %APPDATA% (AppData/Roaming) and %LOCALAPPDATA% (AppData/Local). Caches should go into local appdata, or %TEMP% if you're feeling spicy.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
There's a few ways to set up profiles in Windows, and most of them are terrible. If you have the joy of stepping into a network with roaming profiles enabled, you will discover it takes years to untangle. The idea that you can log into any PC and your local desktop and documents all appear seems really nice, but the implementation weeds are nasty: I tell people to store things they want to access on multiple computers on a network share, and we replicate basically nothing between client PCs. Outlook also likes to download a large chunk of a user's mail archive locally each time you open it on a PC, but you can configure it a bit, and Outlook generally "works fine" while downloading. I suspect it gets hairier at DOD scale though.
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  Onedrive has helped a lot. But only if you can make your users actually use Onedrive. More likely they invent some asinine workflow and save their documents in the most illogical places that will never get synced and you never manage to catch. Also causes problems when trying to recover data from corrupted user profiles.
mattmcknight 5y ago
In my experience, this is a huge factor. They would probably be better off with remote desktop environments.

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago

It could be related to >Currently the service uses both McAfee and Tanium software packages to scan and protect service-issued endpoints like laptops. But the computing power required by multiple programs often interferes with the user’s work, and damages the user experience, or UX.

iamben 5y ago
I read that - but 80 minutes felt extreme.

colechristensen 5y ago

I’m assuming just still using computers that were really cheap a decade ago and then loading them with modern bloated software and security scanning tools. Probably lots of memory swapping and trying to do a lot on a computer that can’t.

StillBored 5y ago

Not, specifically but the article mentions at the end that the original laptops used for the win10 transition were using HD's (aka spinning rust) rather than SSDs because it was a lowest bidder situation. Given what I've seen of corp/gov IT, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the "security software" (aka virus scanners, intrusion detection, etc) then proceeds to hammer the disk/CPU sufficiently that the machine cannot make forward progress. My wife's work machine (a fairly nice, if slim dell) sits there with one of its 4 cores at 100% running a McAfee process hammering the disk doing some kind of scan pretty much 100% of the time. The result is that it pushes that core to max turbo, overheats the system and then throttles the whole thing to ~800Mhz. It then takes a minute or two to open word/etc. And that is with a fairly fast SSD, add in the spinning rust, and i'm sure it would take much longer. And of course its locked down sufficiently that its not possible to even try and fix it.

muttled 5y ago
I've ran into issues on Lenovo computers where there's a shared power allocation for turbo boost and the GPU. Disabling turbo boost fixes issues where there's not enough power for the GPU and also helps keep the computer from going through a turbo boost/heat up/thermal throttling/turbo boost cycle.
agentdrtran 5y ago
The article mentions they use TWO different, heavy endpoint solutions. I'm shocked the computers work at all.
- Moru 5y ago
  Haha, I just (as in 20 min ago) helpled a friend get their computer to work and they had 3 antiviruses running. It's a pretty common problem actually, helped a few people with it the last 20 years.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

easton 5y ago

I worked at a internship one time where by the end of the two month stint my machine would take upwards of 45 minutes to login because there was something that was running on login that had to timeout (because it was broken). Sometimes IT pushes policies that conflict with other stuff and rarely do they check every configuration (or setup alerting for these bad cases). There's lots of reasons it can happen though (especially on Windows, where the mood for 20 years was "cram it all into apply on login GPOs and scripts"). My guess in this case since the machine costs $109 (used, I assume), is that it is running spinning rust and 4GB of RAM, which on Windows 10 isn't a lot of fun. Couple that with all the security crap the DoD has to put on there (which probably spends half its time trying to grab resources from the other security software) and I could definitely see an hour.

the_only_law 5y ago
> Couple that with all the security crap the DoD has to put on there (which probably spends half its time trying to grab resources from the other security software) Corporate spyware is a huge impact to performance, particularly if you have an HDD. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen a computer start to lock up because some security software needs to absolutely abuse the disk.
- cnasc 5y ago
  A “boon” is something that is helpful, not detrimental
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Edited
- muttled 5y ago
  I'm in security, and one thing I always try to stress is that if the security software is causing work stoppages, it should be treated with the same importance as an outage. Just as you wouldn't tolerate an internet connection that went down all the time. Outages from security measures are still outages.

hammock 5y ago

Could be handshake/sync. Could also be indexing (which doesnt prevent Outlook from loading but practically can prevent you from using it if you can't search, etc)

rvba 5y ago

Maybe Russian AND Chinese spyware on a Windows XP machine trying to open current version of outlook that is unoptimized for old computers.

pfortuny 5y ago

If your windows desktop is “shared” between computers in a domain, and the computer you are logging in is old, you are doomed.

Cromation 5y ago

Currently a Air National Guardsmen. I've only had it take that long a handful of times. Usually when it does it is running Microsofts Endpoint Manager and trying to push updates, Scan with McAfee and Tanium, and loading a bunch of scripts in the background that are checking for compliance, setting a default AF or local Comm Squadon background, posting messages relating to the current security levels, etc. Its alot to all run as soon as booted and some things could and should be delegated for off hours but its not how its currently set. Typically the first 30 minutes of my morning is waiting for Outlook, Edge/Chrome, and Teams to open before even trying to open any tools. Also from working in Comm I've seen how they purchase hardware and its pretty frustrating. They will purchase 100 laptops at the end of the year to fill their budget for hte year, but its the lowest priced laptop, which is still almost double or triple what you can purchase it for as a civilian, then often times it will sit in storage and no one will touch it. This often happens due to the leadership not having any actual IT knowledge and they make the purchasing calls so performance isnt at the forefront of their mind.

bityard 5y ago
I was active duty AF 20-some years ago. It's sad to see that absolutely nothing has changed.
- callalex 5y ago
  That’s not true, they’re burning even MORE of our money now!
iamben 5y ago
Oof. Miserable. Thanks for an "I'm living this right now" reply! Appreciated!
mxuribe 5y ago
Great, our military uses Teams; now I know we're doomed. Kidding, just kidding! Seriously now...Hearing the pain here frustrates me because i am actually in favor of paying my taxes because i know when handled properly then roads, bridges, infrastructure, other things, and yes, the right tools for our military are done then everyone benefits...but when things are not managed right, it chafes me so much because the pain ripples all the way through from civil servants unable to do their job, to military folks not having tools to help defend us, to civilians being put at risk while going over unsafe bridges, to commerce not being efficient because roads suck, etc.

jerf 5y ago

In addition to the other totally accurate answers, you can also buy machines that don't have enough RAM, then mandate a software suite that is guaranteed to push the entire machine hip deep into swap merely by booting to the desktop. Every application opening then is a trial of Windows swapping bits of other things out, to load a bit of the application, then having to swap back in the two virus scanners and the malware shield to check the application just loaded, then swap back out those things to load the next resource for the application, then the checkers back in, then the program opens a network address so the network firewalls need to swap in... on an SSD this is slow, on a hard drive you can easily end up in the hours to load a program like this. Scanning through the replies, I'll also add that if you are loading your entire profile from the network, this often becomes much more problematic than the IT people may have initially calculated, because even if you can transfer a gigabyte in 10 seconds, you can't transfer a gigabyte in 10 seconds to thousands of users simultaneously, and logins are highly temporally correlated. It doesn't take much at all to have a cascading network failure as a result, even under perfect conditions, as that 10 second window becomes a 20 second window, which catches ten more people and it turns into a 40 second window, and it explodes quite fast from there as suddenly everyone everywhere is waiting for minutes or hours to load from the same overloaded profile server(s). From what I've witnessed of this, what you'll get is a number of these answers operating at once.