Slow Outlook 2007 on Vista (x64)

I’ve returned from a small trip and I will be preparing my next SQL post soon.

I’ve been struggling with slow POP3 sync behavior on my Outlook 2007/Vista 64 box, and I finally found a hammer to beat it back into submission.

The problem – I sync manually, and when I do the application becomes basically so slow as to be non-responsive. I deleted a bunch of mail to get my mailbox down to a reasonable size (150MB) – still there. I deleted RSS feeds, blaming XML for my woes again :). That didn’t work either.

I eventually found this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;935400

Something to do with the new Vista TCP window size algorithm not working well with “legacy” hardware. No only is the download slow, but using Outlook becomes unbearable as well, so I can’t really do anything with the application… I didn’t get timeout errors (at least not frequently), but I certainly had bad feelings about my email experience.

When I disabled the new TCP window behavior, all went back to what was expected…. Now I have to go find all those RSS feeds again :). So here’s to “netsh interface tcp set global
autotuninglevel=disabled”. It worked for me, at least so far.

I think that this is a case where Microsoft has an opportunity to compare their offering to gmail and determine “hey, I wonder why people think that a webui is better – they are _so_ much slower….” well, in some cases the thick client is actually slower, and that doesn’t make MS look very good. So I hope this workaround avoids frustration for others :).

I’ll also hope that MS could add something to outlook in the next service pack when it realizes that it downloads 15KB in 2
minutes from my POP3 servers. Perhaps they can add a popup or special
error in the next service pack of outlook 2007 to point people in the
right direction.

My setup:
Vista x64 SP1
netgear gigabit 8 port switch
linksys wrt54g NAT
some no-name cable modem that my cable company gave to me.

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