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.

Comments

Indexing

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

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.

Limited problems

[snd_chaser]

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.

Re:Limited problems

[Just Some Guy]

Seems like this only affects

D) Random other factors (maybe whether the profile was upgraded or wiped out and created anew?)
E) C + D

I've never voluntarily deleted a single non-spam email that was sent directly to me (eg, I've pruned old mailing list messages, but not stuff in my main inbox). As of this moment, I'm using Thunderbird 3 and IMAP to access 84,000 emails taking about 2GB on the server. It's still fast and responsive, and uses few resources while idle.

Summary Fail

[The MAZZTer]

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.

Re:Did I notice a severe slowdown? NO

[AliasMarlowe]

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).

Duh?

[tomz16]

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...

Re:Who still uses a local email client?

[omnichad]

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.

Re:MozStorage/Gloda is new in TB 3.0, and uses sql

[scdeimos]

.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.

Re:Did I notice a severe slowdown?

[deroby]

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 !