I have always seen Thunderbird exhibit various delays and hiccups in normal operation. But lately it seems a *lot* worse than usual. There are times when I am typing and every letter has a large fraction of a second delay. Other times none of the letters show up and the interface just locks up for five, ten or even thirty seconds. I pull up task manager and no cause for delays shows up. The CPU usage is below 10%, memory is only half used (out of 16GB) and the disk activity is nearly zero.
This is getting to be the norm rather than the exception. Any ideas?
Yup. Some interaction of antivirus with large mailbox sizes and pig-slow scripts instead of compiled binaries. I switched one of my clients to IMAP4 from POP3 to see if that helps. After a month of trying, it's just about finished loading my ~100k mailbox messages, so we'll see if it's better.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
What is loading what? With IMAP the server keeps all the messages. Are you saying your previously downloaded emails are being pushed back onto the server?
I'm not using TB for email, just newsgroups. I just restarted TB to see if that would help (which it usually doesn't) and at some point it brought up the green progress bar. That bar is still up some 10 minutes later and nothing is going on that I can tell. The status bar doesn't really give you much status on what is going on.
I have never been fully happy with how TB works. I see numerous lesser bugs that never seem to be fixed. It is often that I click an item to view the message and the message pane never fills. I have to click another message then back to get it t work and even then it sometimes doesn't and I have to click other messages. It also pops up a dialog reporting that it wants to download some file which appears to be the raw message perhaps? I've never dug into that one. I often find this on the screen when I leave it running overnight.
At least the bigger issues I used to see have been fixed. I'm still not ready to use it for email. I'm sticking with Eudora, a 10 year old program with no maintenance and only user support. Actually some of it's bugs got fixed when I brought it over to Windows 8. lol Who'd a thunk it?
No, I have it set to keep local copies of everything. Google now has its own archiving function, where you can make a compressed archive of your stuff and download that, but I'm not sure it's reliable enough yet.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
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| James E.Thompson | mens |
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| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Not me. I'm on Thunderbird 38.0.1 , using IMP4 to 5 different mail boxes on 4 different servers. No problems as long as I keep the synchronized mailboxes rather small. Typical is about 2000 messages per mailbox or about 100 KBytes/mbox. The maximum size of a mailbox is 4GB so this is highly conservative. I once let the inbox grow to about 3 GBytes. Slow would a fair description.
The absolute worst thing you can do is use POP3 with the "leave mail on server" box checked. Your mailbox file on the server will grow and grow. Each time you poll for new mail, it has to grovel through the entire mailbox in order to grab a few spam messages at the end.
Computers never really get better, only worse.
- What operating system version?
- What auntie-virus program are you using?
- Any auntie-malware program also running in the background such as malwarebytes?
- Any particular public mail server? 1and1, Gmail, and Hotmail are reasonably fast. Yahoo is really slow. ATT.net varies from speedy to dead depending on which server the DNS lottery selects.
Yeah, I've seen that occasionally. It usually happens when Thunderbird tries to sync mailboxes while I'm typing. Everything comes to a grinding halt until I'm done. When IMAP4 is done doing its thing, then the virus scanner takes over and slows everything down. I don't know any way around this except to not poll or sync for new message while composing. That means turn off the "Check for new messages every xx minutes" and just poll or sync manually.
Assuming Win 7 and above, fire up the task manage and see how much ram Thunderbird is using. If the allocated ram increases when the machine slows down, and does NOT decrease when it's done polling or syncing, then you are the proud owner of a memory leak.
Incidentally, some Tbird add-ons give me problems. Try starting or restarting Thrunderbird with add-ons disabled and see if that helps.
Try reindexing and/or compacting the mailbox files:
Empty the trash. You may have multiple trash cans so be sure to empty all of them.
If you do *NOT* have an SSD drive, defrag the mailbox directories. The stock Windoze defrag only does the entire drive, so you'll need a utility to do just one folder. The mailbox files are under: | C:\Documents and Settings\{your_name-here}\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\{gibberish}\ImapMail" and ..\Mail
Web mail?
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I don't use it for mail, just newsgroups. I don't trust it well enough to switch from Eudora.
I think the network comms may be the problem. This thing doesn't seem to know how to multitask so that it is not uncommon for it to stop just because I have clicked a different group. But then I get the hour glass cursor and know what is causing it. The typing issues and other general slowness issues don't show any indications it is otherwise busy.
Win 8 and I will keep a note of the memory usage. I restarted the program and it is doing better now. Mem is 302 MB.
For newsgroups, I recommend Forte Agent: I'm using an older version (5.00/32.1171) because later version threw in so many features, mostly dealing with handling binareis, that I got lost.
Yeah, sounds about right. I don't really know what Tbird does when you click on a new group, but my guess(tm) is that it's indexing it so that you can see a threaded and date sorted tree. If you have anything more than a trivial number of headers, that can take time.
Hmmm... are you downloading just the headers, or headers and article bodies? If you're downloading all headers and bodies, little wonder your machine gets busy. Set it for headers only and see if things go faster or less obtrusively.
You can also set the process monitor to record peak memory usage. Incidentally, under Windoze XP, Thunderbird shows: 148M mem usage 152M VM mem usage
148M * 152M = 300MBytes, so we're getting about the same numbers. I tried to make the number climb by compacting folders and adding a newsgroup (I don't use Tbird for news). No changes.
Good luck.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
You have some rogue addin or other hogging resources and creating deadlocks. Spam filters and AV products have a bad habit of doing this when very large attachments to emails are being processed.
The thing that irks me about it is that these long-timeout things are obviously being done in the user interface thread, which is the worst sort of noob blunder. I mean, I'm a physicist and I've known not to do that since I started writing multithreaded programs in 1992 (when OS/2
2.0 came out).
These oh-so-skillful comp sci types at Mozilla don't seem to know how to tie their shoes.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Email to my att.net address is now handled by Yahoo!, and has been for probably about 4.5 years now. (One of the relevant config files on my machine was last edited in September 2011.)
This may depend on the history of a particular att.net address. Mine started out with my AT&T Worldnet dial-up account around 1998. At the time it cut over to Yahoo!, the notices hinted that addresses associated with former RBOC DSL accounts were also being cut over to Yahoo!.
I'm not sure why I think this, but I think that att.net addresses associated with business accounts may have taken a different path, and may still be handled by AT&T servers.
In an MUA (mail user agent), priority is given to communications handling while updating the user interface is given a much lower priority. Were this reversed, you would get instant screen updates, but the message contents might be scrambled, or the rate at which messages could be received, decoded, and sorted would be greatly reduced. From my lofty perch, the basic problem seems to be that Thunderbird was originally optimized for email, not Usenet newsgroups. The overwhelming majority of Thunderbird users use it exclusively for email and probably have never heard of Usenet. Usenet was added because Microsoft threw a Usenet news feature into Outlook Express. The Thunderbird authors then decided that they too must have the same feature. Microsoft did a lousy job of integration, message threading, display, performance, etc. Microsoft learned its lesson and neither Outlook or Windoze Live Mail offer Usenet news without installing a
3rd party add-on. Usenet news really should be a separate program and optimized for the task, such as Forte Agent.
Disclaimer: I are not a programmist.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
In an intelligently designed process, the two are in different threads. You can have the UI process poll an event semaphore from the comms thread, and meanwhile get on with redrawing the screen, opening other tabs, and so on. 'Tain't rocket science, and hasn't been for 20-odd years, even on PCs. (Longer in the Unix and mainframe worlds.)
I've written a highly multithreaded electromagnetic simulator code that did that. It doesn't happen by accident, but it's far from the bleeding edge.
Were this reversed, you would get instant screen updates,
Nonsense. That's just a matter of design--you give the comms thread a write lock on whatever part of the mailbox it's updating. You don't lock the whole thing. (Locking a whole db table is an SQL noob mistake.) You certainly don't block the UI thread for any reason. That's why there's such a thing as a message loop.
It does it with email as well. And Mozilla has had NNTP support since the Netscape days. Netscape 4.75 is a better NNTP client than Thunderbird.
Where do you get that history from?
I can tell. ;)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
I don't know about att.net business IDs but there is (for a few more minutes) also an "AT&T Business Internet Service"; att.biz. It was once ibm.net (AT&T bought it in 2000, or so). It is also going away at the end of the month.
They are not necessarily being done in the UI thread it could just be that the priorities are set in such a way that the UI never gets a lookin when traffic is particularly heavy. Insane design but not an uncommon mistake - very few people realise that the most important highest priority task of all is the one that keeps all threads busy!
Aren't they volunteers for the most part?
You do have to stall the UI thread when the data it is about to display is not yet ready. You can get XL2007 charts into states from VBA where the axes are displayed before all the settings have been initialised.
They "Fixed" the race condition by adding delays so it is glacially slow ... Only really becomes a problem with 4 or more CPUs and a large number of graphs are drawn in quick succession using VBA.
You certainly don't block the ability to accept and reflect typing keyboard input which I do see sometimes in Thunderbird even on a bleeding edge CPU. It doesn't happen very often but it *does* happen. And the update delays can be a few seconds which is crazy.
Agreed. The main thing it misses is the ability to have multiple NNTP feeds for any given newsgroup and an annoying tendency to ask for the password if for any reason the other end times out.
A Usenet client isn't all that onerous a burden. It is the Usenet servers which represent a large traffic load on ISPs for what is now a minority interest with no way of monetising (horrible word) it.
The thing that brings it to its knees is often AV software checking large binary emails either on send or receive using rather brute force algorithms that don't scale well. The interaction with the double or quit timeout behaviour on internet links can create a tarpit.
Possible but IMO unlikely. The problem exists in Linux too, and the Linux thread scheduler doesn't allow you to do that. (Despite what the docs say.) Also, once the high priority thread is blocked, the others should get a look-in. It's either being done in the UI thread, or the UI is blocking while another thread is doing the network access.
You didn't have to do that even on Windows 3.31.
Used to be. Dunno about the present. But FOSS is supposed to promote code quality by peer pressure. IIRC nobody at Mozilla likes TB much, probably for the same reasons discussed here.
No, you don't. You update a copy of the data and switch it in and out atomically. Similarly, you use ping-pong buffers for rendering the page. Meanwhile the message loop continues to process WM_PAINT messages as normal, based on the previous version.
Sounds bad.
Yup. Try downloading a 100k message mailbox, or a 900k message newsgroup (even the headers).
Well, you can store your NNTP passwords without worrying about data security, which makes the problem go away.
Yup. Supernews is a lot faster than Eternal September.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
TB, like most modern software, is unable to keep a clean house. When some Usenet group slows to a crawl, I unsubscribe from the affected group, quit TB, clean out the files related to that group in ~/.mozilla/default/mumble.slt/News/, resubscribe and mark everything as read. It helps if you set a limit on the maximum number of articles to download. That usually cures it.
Yep. The performance benefits of the latest hardware and processors is invariably negated by software feature bloat. For entertainment, I've thrown together old hardware (Win 3.1 on a 486 and MacOS 6 on a MacSE) and was amazed at how much faster they ran than the current versions. I also have working Xenix 2.x and SCO 3.2v4.2 systems that are blindingly fast (from the shell prompt) compared to todays Linux systems. The old stuff really is faster. However, if I added a virus scanner and some 3D graphics rendering to the old system, it would quickly grind to a halt. Your NS 4.75 was faster and better because of all the things it did NOT do.
Incidentally, I blundered across this page, which shows some benchmarks on Firefox and Thunderbird: I don't understand what they're doing, but I'll come back to it later and see.
Have you looked at the mozilla.org home page lately? Looks like they're getting involved in adjacent areas (tutorials, web page builders, trinkets, events, etc). Also, looks like Windoze 1.0 style tiles are back in fashion.
Looks like another of my cherished conspiracy theories is wrong. Someone told me the story long ago and I didn't check. The chronology shows that I'm off by about 9 years. Outlook Express was previously Microsoft Internet Mail and News, which was initially released in
1996. Thunderbird was originally Minotaur with V1.0 was in 2005. I stand corrected and my apologies for the misinformation.
Incidentally, most of my experience with Usenet news was using with elm and mush on the client side, and Bnews, Cnews, and INN on the server side. Note that this was as a user, not a programmer. I'm much better at reporting bugs than creating them.
I owe my continued sanity to NOT getting involved in programming. I've hired programmers and seen what they look like after completing a project. No thanks.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I actually really like programming, as long as it's not more than about
15% of my time, and that I get to do it my own way, which I usually do. Keeping that many things in my head at once is fun.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
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