The Entourage database breakthrough

Ever since I started using Entourage 2004, the e-mail/calendar client in Microsoft Office 2004 for the Macintosh, my Mac has periodically “gone away,” with Entourage becoming unresponsive for a minute or more at random intervals, and with a lot of disk activity bogging down the machine.

It took me a long time to realize that Entourage was the root cause of this long-standing problem, which has plagued both my older iMac and my newer MacBook Pro, because even when I’ve quit the Entourage app, the machine would still periodically stall out for two minutes, five minutes, or even longer.

It seemed to be that there was a garbage collection operation going on, but even using the Mac’s Activity Monitor tool, I wasn’t able to identify the culprit. Often, after the Mac went through an annoying episode of unresponsiveness, I’d do a Google search for the symptoms, but nothing I found solved the problem.

To make a long story short, a week ago, after a particularly bad bout of Slow Mac Behavior, I did more searching and found out that not only was Entourage indeed the cause, thanks to process than keeps running background database integrity checks. The integrity checker, called Database Daemon, runs even if you’ve quit Entourage. (I honestly don’t know why I didn’t find this sooner. For example, here’s a February 2007 post on the subject at MacWorld.)

How do you turn this off? You can’t do it from within Entourage, so quit the app. Then run the Database Utility, which is in the Applications/Microsoft Office 2004 folder. You’ll see a dialog box with four options:

• Verify database integrity
• Compact database
• Rebuild database
• Set database preferences

Choose the last option, to set database preferences, and press Continue. You’ll then see a pop-up (pictured) with one check-box item: Perform Database integrity check in the background. Uncheck this box, then press Save.

Now, restart Entourage. The app should stop going away on frequent little vacations from now on. The Database Daemon still runs, by the way, but it takes up fewer resources.

Important Note: You have turned off the database integrity checker, and could make the database more prone to corruption. So, perform this fix at your own risk. (Entourage, unlike Apple Mail, stores all your mailboxes and attachments in one huge database, instead of in a myriad discrete files on your disk.) Therefore, make sure that you’re backing up your Entourage database often. What you should backup, at the very least, is

Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 Identities/Main identity

You should also occasionally go back and manually run the “Verify database integrity” function from within the Database Utility. How often? I don’t know.

If you’re running Entourage 2004, and are having this problem, give this a try.