High CPU use with Microsoft Outlook

SpamSieve
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1

Michael, I am also having the same issue, but I wonder whether this is related to the issue that I wrote you about earlier this year, namely the Old Outlook for Mac issues and constant rebuilding of folders. In my case, the memory hog is so bad that I’ve had to restart my iMac several times due to lack of both physical and virtual memory! FYI that I am still running 13.6 since I can’t upgrade to Sonoma. Would you like me to send in a report as well?

2

Are you referring to this thread? I don’t see anything there about rebuilding of folders.

Is it Outlook or SpamSieve that is showing high CPU use? Yes, I would like to see sample logs from both when this occurs.

3

Thanks or sending the sample logs. The issue with Outlook seems to be that you are using the Inbox setup but have lots of messages in your inbox, and this is overloading Outlook. I recommend moving most of the messages to another folder or switching to the Large Inboxes setup.

I’m not sure what’s going on with Finder; it seems to be mostly idle.

4

Thanks, Michael, and rather than moving any of my mail, I will try the alternative setup, as I prefer leaving the messages where they are. FYI that the problem can get so severe that today I couldn’t even charge my iPhone due to the physical demands for RAM! Crazy as it sounds, the second that I shut off SpamSieve, the problem was resolved. But yes, I just sent the Finder report along just in case it would give you an idea what’s going on. I’ll keep you posted!

5

My guess is that it’s just due to a longstanding issue with Outlook, which is that its AppleScript interface doesn’t work for folders with large numbers of messages. Even if SpamSieve only asks for basic information such as the ID numbers of the messages, Outlook will be very slow, reading lots of information from its database for each message individually, blocking the user interface as it does this, and may use a large amount of RAM. The Large Inboxes setup avoids this problem by ensuring that the folder SpamSieve asks Outlook to read is always almost empty, so it will be fast.