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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?
Nope.
Did I notice any slowdown at all?
Nope....
Solutions for problems that (to me) don't exist...
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.
Yes, storing and providing full text search over a large pile of email consumes resources ... duuuh?
Also they're measuring the performance of Thunderbird while converting to the new system, not in its steady state. This is like complaining that Firefox uses a lot more CPU importing settings from IE than IE uses when looking at your home page.
Their claim as to how long it took to do the full text indexing of the mail seems dubious to me. I've got a similar amount of mail, and the time it took to index was more like minutes, not days.
-Cheetah
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.
This is why all software you use must be open source, this wouldn't happen if people were able to get in and see the code that is actually causing the problems
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
It can go into orbit!
Thunderbird 2 is heavy and can only go supersonic!
There's no contest! What planet are you guys on?
Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbirds_machines
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I suspect you are 99 times more pedantic than the article writer :)
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Thunderbird 2 is a heavy lift loader VTOL craft with a large payload bay.
Thunderbird 3 is an orbit capable single stage rocket that could land in its vertical takeoff position.\
http://www.dan-dare.org/FreeFun/Thunderbirds/ThunderbirdsGallery.htm
somebody had to do it.
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).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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...
You know that you can set up these email clients to work with your web email, right?
That's why they're called email clients and not email servers. Thunderbird can access your hotmail, gmail, and exchange account. Makes it easier than having to log in to each item.
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.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
If your ISP changes, does your email address remain the same just because you use webmail? Didn't think so.
If your ISP changes, and you use *their* webmail, how do you access your old emails?
I have emails going back 10+ years, stored in my local Thunderbird archives, and I've changed email addresses & ISP's more times than I care to remember.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Or you can pick up a portable copy. Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition
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.
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)
At work, I have a Windows machine I need to use. I installed Thunderbird on it to read my personal email.
One day, Thunderbird offered me an update to Thunderbird 3. Sure, why not; I let it upgrade.
So, the next day I got an urgent email from the corporate IT department demanding to know why the corporate antivirus was reporting dozens of viruses on my work computer! I was not pleased.
My email server has a virus scanner (ClamAV of course), and when it detects a virus, it shunts the virus email message into a special folder. I rarely look at the folder or worry about it. Well, Thunderbird 3 changed the default behavior without asking me anything, and downloaded every message in every folder I have. Not just headers, message bodies as well. Thus, it downloaded a bunch of virus emails onto the hard disk of my corporate Windows desktop computer.
Long story short, IT ordered me to uninstall Thunderbird to make sure that this could never happen again. (IT recognizes that the viruses were never active on my system, but they officially have a zero-tolerance policy about viruses being present inside the corporate network at all.)
So I am no longer a Thunderbird user. I found another way to read my personal email while at work.
I was always happy with the old policy, of downloading message headers only, and grabbing the message bodies when I actually opened an email to read it. The new policy might make sense if I had a single machine that I always used to read email and I always wanted my email stuff to be as fast as possible (everything cached to the local hard disk). But I use IMAP and I read my mail from a half-dozen different computers, and the vast majority of my email on my server is old stuff I rarely look at. The new policy of downloading everything makes no sense for me, and I didn't see any way to globally change the setting; it looked to me like you need to change the setting on a folder-by-folder basis. (I could be wrong about that, but it doesn't matter because I had to abandon Thunderbird anyway.)
I don't think defaulting to downloading the entirety of every message on a server is a good idea. And it led to me being forced to abandon Thunderbird, so Thunderbird has at least one fewer user as a result.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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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So the question is, are they still using Mork concurrently? Why are MSF files being updated?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
.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.