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A Pointed Critique of Thunderbird 3's Performance Compared to v.2

Posted by timothy on from the should've-stopped-while-ahead dept.

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.

3 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Did I notice a severe slowdown? by Ossifer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nope.

    Did I notice any slowdown at all?

    Nope....

    Solutions for problems that (to me) don't exist...

  2. Mork by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The problem is Mork. It's a stupid old database that Mozilla products are saddled with. When you have a big one, the whole damn thing needs to be loaded into memory to be parsed. Big folder? Bam, there goes a hundred megs of RAM. Swap if needed.

    Replacing Mork with sqlite started a long time ago, has achieved limited success in some Mozilla products, and has been effectively abandoned in Thunderbird.

    All this burns tremendously more computing resources than are really needed. Why does Mozilla hate the environment?

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    1. Re:Mork by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Classic mistake - writing your own database. This was a long-standing vice in the UNIX world, BIND and Sendmail being the classic offenders. for a long time, Windows had an edge - Jet, which is a little database engine used by applications. The open software world now has sqlite, although it's not used well in Firefox.

      At one point I was trying to explain that a problem they had with duplicate entries in the password database should be fixed by making one field a unique key. "But that would break programs", was the objection. It would break the ones that were inserting bogus data, yes. The solution implemented was a JavaScript kludge that tried to fix the database when Firefox exited, which was O(N^2) at least and could hang Firefox on exiting. So the solution to that was to tell users to get rid of unneeded password entries. Some developers just have no clue about how to use databases.

      SQLite isn't a bad database, provided you don't need to do many concurrent updates. (It can handle concurrent updates correctly, but the locking works by polling and retrying a file lock, which is painfully slow. So don't use it to run your web site. Get MySQL or Postgres,) Given what Firefox does, it really should keep its messages in SQLite databases, not "folders".