Office 365 - Favour

[Simmz]

Hi, could someone do me a favour that is using Office 365 mail please. (online webmail).

Could you open up task manager or processor explorer, then please login to office 365 with any browser. (if you could try with IE as well, but any other browser too).

Once you hit the login button, could you please keep an eye on the process and see if the CPU and memory ramp up high.

Once logged in, could you then just open up an email and see if you also get any spikes.

We seem to have an issue at the moment where the webmail client is using 500-800mb once logged in and the CPU spiking to around 40. If we open an email, the memory can hit 1gb and the CPU spikes again. If I open say maybe 4-8 emails and an attachment in word online, it can go as bad as 3-4gb.

Only reason we've noticed this, is on our Citrix servers, they are completely getting battered and unusable if users are using the webmail and word/excel online version etc. Looking to move away from an E3 to a K2 license next year, which is why this is being tested and the full fat clients are not available with a K2 license.

Thanks a lot.

 

[#Chri5#]

W10 Pro (build 1703), Core i5-6500 with 16GB RAM + SSD

IE11 freshly opened with Google as home page:

Logged into O365 portal - did see a brief spike to around 25% CPU

OWA opened into 2nd tab. Again CPU spiked higher

Double clicked mail to open into it's own pop-up Window

Can repeat the double-click to load e-mails into pop-up windows and see regular spikes for the IE CPU time to 30 to 40% eg

 

[ExRayTed]

Just tested this. CPU (7700K) was sitting at 2% utilisation. Opened work email and CPU use spiked to 34% on login and around 6%-8% when looking at emails. That's on Chrome. On IE it spiked to 25% logging in and around 15% when reading emails. All on Windows 10.

Hope that helps

 

[Simmz]

Thanks a lot much appreciated. I may have to throw this at Microsoft then.

Just seems like high utilisation for what it is doing, plus doesn't do it on the light version.

If I get 5 users on a Citrix server to all open at the same time, the CPU blows up to 100% and memory usage is high, if I get 30 doing it, it completely brings the server to a standstill and a qfarm /load maxes out at 10k and stops anything else being opened.

 

[m4cc45]

Perhaps get the people to use OWA outside of Citrix? Seems odd to log into Citrix just to use OWA - may be worth testing if they can use Outlook (if licenced)?



M.

 

[Simmz]

Perhaps get the people to use OWA outside of Citrix? Seems odd to log into Citrix just to use OWA - may be worth testing if they can use Outlook (if licenced)?



M.

They are using Outlook, but next year will be moved onto a K2 license instead of E3 which then forces you to use the online version as the full clients are not available with that version of the license.

Yes, we are going to look to utilise OWA outside of Citrix if this cannot be rectified, but I just found it odd at how high the mem/cpu utilisation is. Even from Chris's test above, you can see that it is high for what is technically a simple process.

 

[m4cc45]

Yeah i can see the issue - i have no idea why - on mine I don't get a constant hit on the CPU I get it when i'm doing bits (to be expected) but it's only for a couple of seconds. Yours seem to be more constant. It hits around 18-20% in Chrome for me. I'd be interested in MS's response.


M.

 

[Simmz]

It's been escalated up to the development team within the Office 365 team, so I will let you know once I get a response.

 

[Simmz]

Response back:

I have received news from the escalation team that handles the OWA and they confirmed the problem.

It seems that the new features implemented in the code might add to the load on the memory and they are working to solve this issue. However the problem is that the current browsers do not really cope with the code changes and not the OWA itself, so the expected date for a fix would be early 2018.

I will give you more details asap but for the moment this is all that I have for you.

Also you can check this sizing as a reference for your VDIs as requested by Microsoft as minimum requirements.

For example:

The Product Engineering team does add new features and improvements to all of our Office365 products on a regular basis. In doing so, we post the major feature changes to the Office365 Roadmap: https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-roadmap. These are also posted to your Office365 admin centre dashboard. In review of launched and rolling out updates, these are for OWA.

1. Outlook on the web: View Inline Images Side-by-Side

2. Outlook on the web: OneDrive Sharing Improvements

3. Outlook on the web: OneDrive Sharing Tips

4. Focused Inbox changes: https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2016/07/26/outlook-helps-you-focus-on-what-matters-to-you/

5. Drag and drop emails into group mailbox

6. New first run experience


Thank you for understanding.


Best regards,

Cristian