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.

Did I notice a severe slowdown?

[Ossifer]

Nope.

Did I notice any slowdown at all?

Nope....

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

Re:Did I notice a severe slowdown?

[citylivin]

Well your lucky then. I upgraded to thunderbird 3 half a year ago and had to downgrade back to thunderbird 2. The reasons were exactly the same as the article, all around poor performance, many crashes and problems. I tried some fixes such as disabling indexing, but they only made it bearable. Thunderbird 2 however is rock solid on my quad core machine.

Do you use both imap and pop? Are you on linux instead of windows? There is probably some way you are using the program that does not reflect the majority. I have heard many reports of people with problems with thunderbird 3 performance. Simply take a look at their forums to get a good sampling.

Re:Did I notice a severe slowdown?

[MSG]

Simply take a look at their forums to get a good sampling.

Whatever you get from the forums will not be a "good sampling". Users for whom Thunderbird works normally (which I presume to be the majority) will not be posting on the forums.

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 !

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.

New features consume resources, news at 7

[TheMeld]

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.

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.

stupid propritary

[ArsonSmith]

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

Thunderbird 3 is *much* faster!

[WolfWithoutAClause]

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

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:Duh?

[DerPflanz]

The two proposed changes in the article are to :
- disable the global indexer
- disable caching of messages to the local computer

I consider it a design flaw that these two settings are on by default, also for IMAP folders. The whole point of IMAP folders is to keep your email on the server. I don't want to download 4+ years worth of e-mail to my computer. I had the same problems and immediately switch these two options off on any new installations.

I found this already on May 5th. Didn't know about the options though. I ditched version 3 for 2 for a short perios of time afterwards.

Mork

[bill_mcgonigle]

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?

Re:Mork

[Animats]

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".

Upgrade forced me to abandon Thunderbird

[steveha]

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