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A Pointed Critique of Thunderbird 3's Performance Compared to v.2
PerfProtector writes "Did you recently install Thunderbird 3 or upgrade from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3? Did you notice any severe slowdown in your machine or a major decrease in its performance? Well, many people around the world encountered these problems. We wrote a technical analysis about the severe problems that are caused by Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client. These problems include anomalous usage of CPU, memory, hard disk and Internet bandwidth. You can read the full analysis, including several graphs that show how bad the situation is and what went wrong from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3. For example, while CPU utilization of Thunderbird 2 is usually between 0% to 10%, with an average of 0.3%, Thunderbird 3 CPU utilization is between 5% to 80%, with an average of 30% — 100 times more than Thunderbird 2. In addition, during long periods of time, Thunderbird 3 used more than 50% of the overall CPU resources.This behavior slows dramatically the whole machine." It's worth noting that this analysis comes from developers who have developed a (freeware) tool they claim will improve Thunderbird's performance, but they explain also how to do so with manual changes.
I have not really seen this behavior, but have seen it get stuck doing some kind of indexing forever, or at least until I restart Thunderbird.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Seems like this only affects
A) People with very large mailboxes
B) People using IMAP
C) A + B
I haven't encountered any problems with Thunderbird 3.
Would be nice to mention that the increases are due to use of search indexing and/or IMAP account synchronization (especially with a large amount of e-mail). They don't do a comparison of what happens when you turn those off which I think would be more useful.
On a side note I was bored with the apparently stagnation of Thunderbird (I couldn't even find a good Aero Glass extension that worked during the 3.1 beta) I tried Windows Live Mail. It was interesting up until the point where it refused to show any mail from one of my accounts and insisted it wasn't failing. At least Thunderbird actually worked...
Switched one of my machines to Linux and am using Evolution which is actually quite nice... the account setup was far more pleasant and simple than Thunderbird or WLM and both my accounts worked fine.
I also use Thunderbird 3 for 2 pop mailboxes and 1 imap mailbox (with about 8 email addresses in aggregate). No slowdown or resource-hogging has been observed. It appears just as snappy as Thunderbird 2 was, but with a few new features.
FYI, this is not on a multi-core speed-demon PC. We run Thunderbird on a 7-year-old Pentium-M laptop (Ubuntu 10.04).
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The two proposed changes in the article are to :
- disable the global indexer
- disable caching of messages to the local computer
It should come as no surprise that these two features increase cpu load and bandwidth consumption respectively...
I think you'll find searching is now an even cheaper operation, since the slowdown seems to be caused by the background indexing service. So actual searches should be using a perpetually-maintained index now and be really snappy.
I see an indexing-related message in the notification area occasionally, but it has never really affected anything I wanted to do. I may have had to wait a second or two to get into a folder right after I've received a bunch of mail, but not often and the delay is short enough as to be pretty much unnoticeable.
Well, except right after the upgrade, when it had to index all of the emails it discovered in my folders. That caught me by surprise and took a while, and I had sporadic access to my precious saved email during the process, which was unsettling.
It would have been nice to get a "do you want to index your messages now, or turn off indexing?" prompt on first startup, because the slowdowns made me think Thunderbird had boned my email store and I'd have to go to backups.
On the other hand, that was a one-time hassle and I love the new instant search.
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Or you can pick up a portable copy. Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition
100 times more:
y = x + 100x
y= 101x
100 times as much:
y = 100x
Make sense now?
IMAP is the way to go. You can have your webmail client wherever you go. But at home, the performance of a desktop client is better. Read/unread status is propagated, and any labels and flags are as well. Gmail supports this fairly well.
Users of ISP email is a strawman that has no place in this discussion.
Haven't noticed the issue on OS X 10.6.4 --I wish the same could be said for Firefox though on both OS X and Windows. An interesting note, as I was reading the summary, TB popped-up a dialog that said v3.1.2 was available.
I've got your sig, right here.
Thunderbird 3 builds indexes of your mail boxes for every account. If you have huge mailboxes, the indexer is going to need some time to look through it all. You can turn off the indexing if you want through the advanced config editor (global search and indexing)[0].
"By default, Gloda indexing is enabled [93], also for migrating accounts. Note that indexing a large amount of e-mails takes considerable time and resources, especially when setting up a new account or migrating from an old profile! " [1]
[0] - http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mail_and_news_settings
[1] - http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_3.0_-_New_Features_and_Changes
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.sqlite files are used for all the user profile-related stuff, including search index files.
Unfortunately Mork is still used in the message stores themselves - the .msf files are Mork DB files (currently v1.4) used to index individual message folders. Users who keep thousands of messages in one folder (especially the Inbox) will be performance impacted more than users who file stuff away into separate folders.
The specification of IMAP SEARCH contains a lot of "MAY" statements (esp. regarding charsets), so it may be that the TB implementors have decided that they want a search which actually does the exact same thing regardless of what IMAP server you're using. There's also the very real possibility that various IMAP servers don't actually implement what's specified -- IMAP is notorious for this, even regarding such basic things as folder structure.
Although I agree that the indexing took quite a some time & resources, once it's finished with that, so is the 'slowdown'...
Not sure why everybody needs to moan so much about this. If you don't need/want/like it, then simply switch it off... whining idiots!
That said, I wouldn't be surprised that next week we get a new Slashdot story about how slow searching in Thunderbird with indexing turned off is soooo slow !
ps: I have about 10 years of email sitting in there (about 1.4Gb, imported from Eudora some years back) and although I'm not happy with everything TB v3, I sure like the fact that searching something is that fast now !
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
Have you tried a new profile? Apologies if that seems a bit condescending but it fixes a lot of problems, especially if you have been upgrading from older versions. I had issues with 3.0 which I fixed by making a new profile and copying my bookmarks and a few other bits into it.
There should really be a big flashing message telling you to do that when you click on the help menu.
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