Outlook2013 memory leak and cpu hogging

I started noticing the heavy disk use about two weeks ago. Upon investigating I noticed that the process Outlook.exe was taking up almost all of the memory available which caused the heavy disk use (paging out). After that I restarted Outlook and, after a short while, that behavior came back. The symptoms are:

1. around 25% CPU for the Outlook.exe process (on my quad-core);

2. Incremental occupation of memory (Private working set) with no apparent limit (I have had no time to test whether or not a limit will be reached);

3. the Outlook.exe process is writing to a .ETL file, but there is only one of these files present at any given time;

4. because of the lack of free memory the system begins paging which renders my machine virtually useless;

Have made several attempts to isolate/mitigate the problem (disabled the add-ins, repaired the installation). Nothing seems to work.
June 1st, 2015 11:03am

Hi,

I've noticed you have also posted in this thread below:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/a627a7ad-c77e-40b0-8ef3-5aa89903abdd/oteledata-etl-files-being-created-causing-performance-issues-and-space-issues?forum=officeitpro

Have you tried disabling the global logging in your Outlook client?

  • Launch Outlook, on the File tab, select Options.
  • In the Outlook Options dialog box, click Advanced.
  • Scroll down the list of settings, check whether the Enable troubleshooting logging (requires restarting Outlook) option is selected. If yes, deselect it then try again.

Also try adding this registry value below:

Important Follow the steps in this section carefully. Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Before you modify it, back up the registry for restoration in case problems occur.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\ClientTelemetry
Value name: DisableTelemetry
Value Data:1

Regards,

Melon Chen

Forum Support

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June 2nd, 2015 2:50am

You are correct. I had posted on another thread but Ethan Hua from Support suggested that I started a new one because the symptoms I was describing were not exactly the same has the ones posted there. I'm am not having multiple *.ETL files being created. Just one at any given time.

Furthermore, I had already tried both of your suggestions without any luck.

I have also disabled Hardware Graphics Acceleration (I read somewhere that it might be causing the leak). No change.

Regards,

Lus Moreira

June 2nd, 2015 4:36am

Delete the etl file, will it still be created?

If you are using Exchange, make sure it is in Cached Mode.

If you are not using an Exchange account, please configure the send/receive interval a bit longer(2 or 3 minutes).

Something else to consider, like is the data file really big? Use auto-archive feature in Outlook to reduce the data file size and big data files really really cause unexpected performance issues.

-Jeff

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June 3rd, 2015 9:29am

I have tried deleting the file after closing Outlook and then opening it again. The file is created and written to up to 51200 kb. Outlook then creates a second file and deletes the first one. This creation and deletion happens almost once a minute.

The file is named "OTeleData_6088_3.etl" where 6088 is the outlook.exe pid. I think that the numeral 3 is just a sequence number.

What I find puzzling is that the new file grows up to 51200 KB in less than ten seconds.

While this is happening the outlook.exe process keeps claiming more and more memory.

I'm using Exchange in Cached Mode. The data file is not very large (less than 1Gb).

Thanks,

Lus

June 3rd, 2015 1:02pm

Hi,

Regarding this issue I think we need to perform the dump or TTT trace analysis to find the root cause, and in forum it's hard to do. I suggest you open a premier ticket for this issue.

Regards,

Melon Chen

Forum Support

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
June 4th, 2015 1:48am

I have just learned why setting this registry key did not work for me: Outlook 2013 clears it when it starts!

Is there some way to do this such that Outlook will actually disable the telemetry?

July 14th, 2015 10:50pm
Same behavior on my side...

Impossible to disable telemetry :(


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July 21st, 2015 6:33am

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