Windows Search service causes frequent Outlook/Zimbra crashes

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joe00
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Oct 19, 2020 6:32 pm

Windows Search service causes frequent Outlook/Zimbra crashes

Post by joe00 »

My company recently took over support for a client that uses Zimbra to access their mail through Outlook. We built a new Server 2019 RDS server for their 15 or so employees. It's running 64-bit Outlook for Office 365 16.0.12527.21096 in shared activation mode. The Zimbra Connector for Microsoft Outlook is version 8.8.9.17715.

Once we enabled the Windows Search service on the RDS server, several (but not all) users started experiencing frequent Outlook crashes. There are tons of search related errors in the Application folder in Event Viewer. Sometimes the users will get errors indicating that Outlook can't open the .zdb file because of the Windows search service. Sometimes Outlook just closes and can't be opened again until the process is killed in Task Manager. This happens while Outlook is being used, and when it's idle/users are working on something else.

I enabled Zimbra logging, and can see numerous SearchProtocolHost.exe .dmp files for affected users. Outlook logging was enabled for all users via Group Policy as well.

I opened a support case with the mail provider. Their first suggestion was to rebuild the profiles which didn't help. The server is new, and the profiles were basically brand new when they started crashing anyway. We escalated, and they're now advising that some of the Zimbra databases are too large (a few are around 20 GB), and users will need to delete or archive mail to get Outlook working properly.

Not sure this is the exact cause since the crashing is affecting a smaller 6 GB .zdb file. And the users did not experience these same problems using their previous remote environment with the same size databases.

Windows Search was disabled all of last week, and no one had their Outlook crash. I tested rebuilding the search index over the weekend and re-enabling the service, but that didn't help. Crashes started again early this morning, with the logs showing SearchProtocolHost.exe as the culprit.

Has anyone experienced anything like this before? Are there recommended settings to get Zimbra databases working properly with Windows search? What actually is too large for a Zimbra database? This is my first time using/supporting Zimbra, so any help or advice would be appreciated. I have plenty of log files that can be provided if they would be helpful.

Thanks!
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