1084276 - Runaway memory usage when starting because of large panacea.dat (eg. 110MB)

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

Description

[Pete Ford]

Attachment: Dump file from ".thunderbird/Crash \Reports/pending"

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0
Build ID: 20141013195847

Steps to reproduce:

Attempted to start thunderbird from Kubuntu menu.
Also tried command line:
  /usr/bin/thunderbird -safe-mode
with the same outcome.
Thunderbird crashed at some point before this problem occurred: crash logs attached if they are any use. It may be that something has been corrupted in the crash?


Actual results:

Dialog appears about checking add-ons for compatibility: this finishes and closes, then memory usage by the thunderbird process starts to increase. Initially it jumps rapidly to around 5Gb resident, then increases more gradually until it gets all the available RAM (on an 8Gb machine) and then starts using swap space. That really kills the machine and eventually I have to kill the process before it eats everything.


Expected results:

Thunderbird should have at least showed me the user interface - I don't even get that (apart from the compatibility dialog)

Comment 1

[Pete Ford]

Attachment: extra file from ".thunderbird/Crash\ Reports/pending"

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Crash report will probably not be useful as it will just indicate OOM.
Try starting with  -offline
If that still fails, please try a new profile. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-multiple-profiles

please post your results

Comment 3

[Pete Ford]

Not at all sure what happened, but I tried a new profile and that was fine.
I saw something online about panacea.dat being an occasional pain, so I deleted that in the orginal profile and everything is sweet again. I guess panacea.dat got corrupted?
I still have a copy of the broken profile if it would help

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Can you tell us the size of your panacea.dat from the problematic profile?

Comment 5

[Pete Ford]

$ ls -la panacea.dat 
-rw-r--r-- 1 pete pete 110055248 Oct 15 13:37 panacea.dat

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Pete Ford from comment #5)
> $ ls -la panacea.dat 
> -rw-r--r-- 1 pete pete 110055248 Oct 15 13:37 panacea.dat

Thanks for that info. 110MB yikes!  this is #17 in https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems

Perhaps a result of bug 65086.

Do you often have problems shutting down Thunderbird, and have to kill it?
And, does Help | Troubleshooting show any crash reports?

Comment 7

[Pete Ford]

OK: Let's look at the WikiPedia article you reference.
Taking the Diagnosis steps:
1.  Tried Safe Mode - no difference.
2.  Not using Windows (Ubuntu Linux 12.04)
3.  Tried re-installing: same problem when using the 'bad' profile.
4.  No antivirus on this machine, or at least nothing automatic: I sometimes run ClamAV...
5.  No local firewall on the machine, and the external firewall is pretty relaxed about outgoing stuff.
6.  No gmail accounts set up.
7.  Cannot access account settings to try this, but no Newsgroups were configured.
8.  Ditto - no RSS feeds were in use.
9.  No desktop indexing in use.
10. 
11. Cannot do any UI operations...
12. Ditto
13. Largest folder currently reports 250MB
14. Cannot do any UI operations...
15. There are non-Inbox IMAP folders configured to check for new messages (around 20 of them), but that hasn't been a problem previously (or since, using a cleaned-up profile)
16. Address book has around 425 contacts
17. Yes, but you know that :) Bug 65086 might be similar - I had an unclean Thunderbird shutdown which might have broken panacea.dat
18. No error message seen.
19. CPU is not high, only memory usage.
20. Profile is on a local hard drive.

I have had very few problems with TB shutting down or crashing - I'm not sure there's anything systematic going on, but I will pay more attention from now on.

Comment 8

[:aceman]

It seems to me panacea.dat should be written and compressed at TB close.

How many folders do you have?

Comment 9

[Pete Ford]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #8)
> It seems to me panacea.dat should be written and compressed at TB close.
> 
> How many folders do you have?

I have four main IMAP accounts configured, with a total of around 100 folders.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Pete, this will cause some havoc if you hasn't done it already, but if you delete panacea.dat does probblem go way for at least a long time?

(In reply to :aceman from comment #8)
> It seems to me panacea.dat should be written and compressed at TB close.

aceman, perhaps we could use better checks of  panacea.dat at startup?

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, use Needinfo for questions) from comment #10)
> Pete, this will cause some havoc if you hasn't done it already, but if you
> delete panacea.dat does probblem go way for at least a long time?

I should have said, rename it.

Pete, What are your results??

Comment 12

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard