I just read this, brough up Task Manager, minimized Outlook and watched.

Outlook started at around 3K of memory and slowly (very slowly) began climbing. It did a send/receive and jumped to 9K+ but instead of falling back down afterwards, it continued the previous slow climb. In the time I have taken to write this, it has reached 10, 020K. The total time elapsed between 3k and 10k was less than 5 minutes.

I also use LookOut and have Outlook set to minimize to the Notification Area.
[Currently at 11,176K.]

Sweet, setting it to minimize to the notification area fixed the memory issue (dropped from ~70000 to ~2500). I will see if this fixes the race issue as well. Steps to reproduce the race issue are: don't set outlook to minimize to notification, minimize outlook to the taskbar, then simply walk away from the machine until the monitor shuts off (no hibernation, sleep, etc)...my monitor shuts off after 10 minutes, though I am not sure that's an essential step. I would love to see if this issue pops up on other machines.

Thanks for the advice.

Your blog was forwarded to me; hopefully I have a couple of answers.

First off, I don't know of any leaks; and the product hasn't changed for quite a while, but I'm open to the possibility of a bug.

Regarding your #2 issue above - Lookout normally won't index if you are using your machine. If you walk away from your machine for 15 minutes or so (no keyboard or mouse activity) Lookout will wakeup and start indexing away. It does this to try to be "friendly" and not interfere with your use of the machine when you are not idle. If you start using your computer again, it will immediately pause (hence the CPU drop to zero). To see what is happening, you can look at the Lookout log file for "pause" and "resume" entries. You can also turn off automatic indexing via the options if it is causing you trouble. The one time that pause/resume does not happen is when you leave the indexing window open. This will force it to just index without pausing.

Regarding your #1 issue above - Outlook memory usage. Outlook uses some pretty aggressive caching internally, and unfortunately, when Lookout does a full index, it touches literally every single message in your mailbox. This causes the outlook process to grow pretty large, as you point out. I've definitely seen it in the 150-200MB range routinely. We've done our best to make it so lookout releases all memory quickly, yet Outlook still caches, which is why you see the large size. To prove that its just Outlook memory, and not a leak, you can do the following test:
1. start outlook, with lookout loaded.
2. click Lookout -> Index
3. check "rebuild" and click start.
4. watch the memory use climb
5. when it gets really large, minimize the outlook window.
6 check outlook memory size. Did it shrink dramatically?

For some reason, Outlook releases lots of RAM when you minimize it - I see it drop to <10MB in most cases. Lookout doesn't do anything when the Outlook window closes. So hopefully this also shows that its not a leak. I haven't seen it unbounded, either. While it does use lots of RAM; it does stop growing. This is definitely an issue to fix; there is too much RAM being used for sure. If it were a simple fix, we definitely would have fixed already :-)

Where does this leave you? Well, you are right that Lookout + Outlook use a lot of RAM. If thats a showstopper, your only recourse may be to not use it, or to set indexing to run in the middle of the night via the options. But hopefully, its not.

Hope this helps! If you have more questions - feel free to ping us at http://www.lookoutsoft.com/

Good news and bad news. Your posting on 9/15 works exactly as described, including minimize, and continual growth while minimized. I had narrowed it to Outlook already. But, I don't have Lookout - just Outlook. As far as I know I am not running any indexing. This behavior continues both with Outlook minimized and after closing. I have to use task Manager to kill it.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=827310 :(

No comment....

same problem with just outlook 2003 it uses all my memory resources. it has to be a leak

The fix we found for Outlook 2003 to prevent the pegging out of the processor...
was to turn off the caching.

Works perfect for us.

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