Experiencing performance problems when you are working with items in a large .pst file

At times, MS Office Outlook 2007 stops responding temporarily to typical operations. This includes when you read email messages, move email messages, or delete email messages. These symptoms are most visible during mail delivery or during synchronization. Also, the symptoms are prominent when store size increases. This is likely to occur when size of PST file or size of OST file reaches its threshold limit of 2 GB. In addition to this, they are prominent in large pst or ost file that is 4 GB or larger.

To deal with this problem, Outlook 2007 has introduced a new data structure for PST files and OST file. In this new data structure, the frequency of writing data to the hard disk increases as the number of items in the PST or OST files increases. You cannot create a PST or OST file without this new data structure.

This issue can be dealt with, by following the options mentioned below:

1. Reduce size of Exchange mailbox- If you reduce the size of Exchange mailbox, the size of OST file will also be reduced. To reduce the size of Exchange mailbox, you can either delete items in your mailbox or archive items in your mailbox to one or more .pst files.

2. Use online mode profile instead of cached mode profile- Cached mode profiles use OST file to store mailbox locally on hard disk. If you have a large Exchange mailbox, you will obviously have larger OST file. This way online mode profile should be used.

3. Split large PST files into several smaller pst files. However, Outlook 2007 doesn’t have an in-built function to split PST file into multiple pst files.

4. Use a filter to restrict the items that you synchronize from Exchange to your OST file.

This way the issue you were facing of decreased performance due to large PST or OST files can be resolved. If at any point of time, PST file corruption occurs and restricts you form opening Outlook, take help of Kernel for Outlook to repair Outlook. It will repair Outlook PST file and recover all possible emails and other items from it.

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