So at what point does the PST file size actually affect outlook performance?

got a guy at work with 12gb PST file full of emails dating back to god knows when. Going to make him archive everything up until last year.

12/6/2011 8:42:45 PM

Depends on the memory in the system. 12gb is fucking crazy though.

PST's (and Outlook) are treated pretty specially in Windows though, so it's not like having Outlook open will consume 12gb of working memory. Outlook indexes mailboxes through the windows indexing service, so (most) everything is virtualized.

The amount of working memory is somewhat loosely related to the size of the currently visible folder. Outlook 2010 seems to have ~75mb of resident memory use, plus whatever the current open folder size is. Which is based on the number of messages, not the size of their contents.

So if he keeps his inbox fairly reasonable (<10,000 messages), he actually shouldn't have that big of a perf issue (if any).

12/6/2011 8:52:57 PM

Dang, thats a lot of email. My offlne PST is 8.5 GB, and it has every email i have sent or received in the almost 7 years at this job.

12/6/2011 9:01:25 PM

he's noticing crawls and such when he's dragging and filing emails away. He says it's pretty sporadic - some days not an issue, some days it grinds when an email is dropped in a folder.

Our online inbox is 200 MB and everything is deleted after 30 days. Pretty much forcing people to file their shit away.

12/6/2011 9:28:58 PM

Is the PST on a network share (note, I'm not an IT guy and this might be a terribly stupid question).

12/6/2011 9:57:14 PM

outlook is for old fogies

webmail is where it's at

12/6/2011 10:16:47 PM

Mine personally got wonky around 2gb. Ive been there for about 2.5 years and have already reached 5.5gb ( lots of price models back and forth).

12/6/2011 10:37:21 PM

mine seemed to start getting a little wonky when i got over the 5gb mark. Ran auto-archive and the conversation stripper, and cleaned my pst down to 1.3gb. Took about 45 minutes total to get it down to size again.

12/7/2011 12:49:23 AM

Mine is at 3.1 GB right now. Oddly enough Outlook crashed a few minutes ago after I walked away...

12/7/2011 1:22:14 PM

its actually 19 GB, saw it today.

12/7/2011 6:39:22 PM

Mine is over 20gb.

Outlook worked fine, just do not try to search for anything without food on hand.

I have stopped using outlook though, just open it ever couple of weeks to make an offline backup of my gmail. gmail>outlook

12/7/2011 9:31:24 PM

dude has a 20 gig pst file and it wont even open in outlook, so i cant just archive it into smaller pst files from within outlook

any recommendations on an external PST splitter app? i've found like 10 of them, but i dont know if they are all basically the same as far as reliability, options, etc

i just want to take the huge pst file and split it up into smaller pst files based on date ranges

1/31/2013 2:03:09 PM

i've noticed performance issues after they get too big - i started splitting up by year and i only keep the previous year loaded in outlook - it's rare that i need to search further back than that and when i do i just load the pst - i keep 99% of my email and our exchange policy only allows 1GB server storage

   222M Aug 19 23:18 2009.pst
   3.1G Sep  3 06:12 2010.pst
   4.7G Jan 14 20:11 2011.pst
   4.5G Jan 31 10:54 2012.pst
   114M Jan 31 10:54 2013.pst
   5.9G Jan 29 01:08 Support.pst

1/31/2013 2:11:05 PM

This came up in a meeting yesterday and, evidently, we've noticed problems here when they get over 15 GB. LOL.

Evidently some users have > 30 GB PST files.

1/31/2013 2:48:41 PM

supposedly this wasn't an issue pre-Outlook 2007, based on how Outlook processed data when reading a PST file, and supposedly there is a hotfix that helps

but only to an extent it seems, since Microsoft recommends PST files no larger than 2-4 gigs

1/31/2013 3:14:11 PM

Outlook Memory Usage: 85MB
OST File Size: 660MB
(our servers are set to autodelete after 3 months time) ~ 1633 emails, 373 sent or so.

We use Oasys Mail Manager to file/archive emails into network project drives.

[Edited on January 31, 2013 at 3:44 PM. Reason : .]

1/31/2013 3:35:25 PM

Before Outlook 2010, I'd see some of them get corrupted when they got much larger than 2gb. Then I'd find someone with a 17gb pst. Seemed like a crap shoot.

2010 & 2013 they can get pretty damned large with little impact. I think they say 12 is the best practices limit, but 2013 handles them so efficiently it would be a SHITLOAD of messages to hit that.

1/31/2013 8:04:48 PM

Mine was over 20gb whwn i finally said screw outlook and switched to google apps.

2/1/2013 12:51:14 AM

Im switching computers, what's the proper way to move my PST file to the new computer so i have access to all my old archived emails?

2/1/2013 2:21:22 PM

Copy file.
Paste file.
Open file.

It's really that simple.

2/1/2013 7:04:35 PM

I've archived this 20 gig PST file into a few 5 gig files based on year, but the main outlook.pst file still shows up as being 20 gigs...whats up with that?

2/2/2013 9:17:51 PM

file size in Outlook: Tools > Mailbox Cleanup > View Mailbox size is about 650 megabytes

but in filetree / windows explorer, it still shows as massive size

2/2/2013 10:27:56 PM

I just put my old computer that had outlook on it on a shelf in the basement, it is like a time capsule for if any clients try to file a complaint or audit anything from 2009. The rest of my life is in the cloud and it takes like .0001 seconds to search it via GOOGLE

2/2/2013 11:48:18 PM

OST != PST.

PST are archives and saved messages. Dont delete thieve (but do make new ones from time to time)

OST is your working file. Contains non-archived msgs, your calendar, etc. If you are on Exchange, you can safely delete this file. It will rebuild itself from the server. Recommended you delete it periodically.

2/3/2013 8:31:47 AM

ah

2/3/2013 1:23:45 PM

I typically try to get a new file for every ~3gb (which usually equates to about every 6 months).

2/3/2013 7:20:36 PM