1310948 - Thunderbird 45.4.0 in safe mode using 100% of one CPU core. Nothing in activity manager.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Giedrius]

Attachment: Thread stack thunderbird 100% CPU

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0
Build ID: 20160920074044

Steps to reproduce:

Using Thunderbird for mail sending receiving (IMAP).


Actual results:

Sometimes Thunderbird begin to use 100% of one core. This load never ends. Thunderbird is working  a little bit slow.
Task manager show system cpu usage increased.  
That happens every day, sometimes more than once.
I've captured some stack dumps with process explorer of thread using cpu (attached)


Expected results:

Normal CPU usage.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you see the problem when started in safe mode?
 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/safe-mode

Comment 2

[Giedrius]

This problem dissapeared when in safe mode (Checked for two days).
Today I've tried with all the plugins and extensions disabled - problem appeared again.

Comment 3

[Giedrius]

Today I saw this problem in safe mode. Thunderbird was using more than 3 hours of CPU time (one core 100%) .  I thought that user started thunderbird in normal mode, but thunderbird was in safe mode.
So this problem exists in safe mode.

Comment 4

[louis]

I am seeing this issue on Mac OS X, both "El Capitan" and "Sierra". Also in both "safe" mode and normal. It also occurs on the latest beta - 50.0b3. I had first seen it while following the v45 releases - but I can't pin down exactly where it first started happening as it sort of creeped up.

This appears to have started happening intermittently a couple weeks ago and became steadily more prevalent.

Occasionally the issue disappears and remains "gone" until Thunderbird is restarted.

I have also tried disabling all extensions and restarting to no avail. My first instinct was to try and disable them one at a time. After going through all of them, the problem persists.

Please let me know if I can provide any additional information. Thanks,

Louis

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to louis from comment #4)
> I am seeing this issue on Mac OS X, both "El Capitan" and "Sierra". Also in
> both "safe" mode and normal. It also occurs on the latest beta - 50.0b3. I
> had first seen it while following the v45 releases - but I can't pin down
> exactly where it first started happening as it sort of creeped up.
> 
> This appears to have started happening intermittently a couple weeks ago and
> became steadily more prevalent.

45.0 came out in April. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/45.0/releasenotes/

So you are saying it starting happening in ... September?
What happens if you go back to https://releases.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/45.2.0/mac/en-US/ which released in MJuneay?

Comment 6

[louis]

It's very hard to say exactly when I noticed this - there were a few odd things in recent versions, but it worked ok anyway so I didn't go digging deeper.

This version (45.2) is doing it too, as is 45.1 and 38.8! Maybe it just flew under my radar as I don't often reboot or quit Thunderbird.

38.8 did have some feedback in the Activity Manager - something to the effect of "finding which files to index" in a certain folder. This message does not appear in Activity Manager in the 4x.x versions at all. I do have some folders with a lot of messages and I wonder if the heavy processing is in some kind of synchronization/indexing.

There is another thing that started with 45.4 that must have tipped me off to this - there is a huge lag between startup and the first window appearing during which time things got sluggish. That's probably a different ticket though.

It would be nice to be able to inspect activity within the application. There probably is some tool, but I have not attempted to look for such a thing...

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Taking things out of order

(In reply to louis from comment #6)
> ...
> It would be nice to be able to inspect activity within the application.
> There probably is some tool, but I have not attempted to look for such a
> thing...

There is not one all around tool suitable for diagnosing all possible issues. Rather, there are various tools each suitable to focus on a specific types of issue - once one narrows down the field to be explored.


> There is another thing that started with 45.4 that must have tipped me off
> to this - there is a huge lag between startup and the first window appearing
> during which time things got sluggish. That's probably a different ticket
> though.

https://mzl.la/2etExf3 is the list of bugs created in the past 6 months. AFAIK, none of them specific to 45.4.0


> It's very hard to say exactly when I noticed this - there were a few odd
> things in recent versions, but it worked ok anyway so I didn't go digging
> deeper.
> 
> This version (45.2) is doing it too, as is 45.1 and 38.8! Maybe it just flew
> under my radar as I don't often reboot or quit Thunderbird.
> 
> 38.8 did have some feedback in the Activity Manager - something to the
> effect of "finding which files to index" in a certain folder.

That would be "determining which messages to index".  There have been reports of issues related to this. Is it a gmail account?

Comment 8

[Giedrius]

Issue is constant. Once or more times a day I see thunderbird using CPU at 100 percent. Users are working in a Terminal Server environment so extreme cpu usage is noticeable.  Today Į saw this problem in account which was using only IMAP. 
IMAP message synchronising to a local disk is disabled.

Comment 9

[louis]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #7)
> Taking things out of order
> 
> (In reply to louis from comment #6)
> > ...
> > It would be nice to be able to inspect activity within the application.
> > There probably is some tool, but I have not attempted to look for such a
> > thing...
> 
> There is not one all around tool suitable for diagnosing all possible
> issues. Rather, there are various tools each suitable to focus on a specific
> types of issue - once one narrows down the field to be explored.
> 
> 
> > There is another thing that started with 45.4 that must have tipped me off
> > to this - there is a huge lag between startup and the first window appearing
> > during which time things got sluggish. That's probably a different ticket
> > though.
> 
> https://mzl.la/2etExf3 is the list of bugs created in the past 6 months.
> AFAIK, none of them specific to 45.4.0
> 
> 
> > It's very hard to say exactly when I noticed this - there were a few odd
> > things in recent versions, but it worked ok anyway so I didn't go digging
> > deeper.
> > 
> > This version (45.2) is doing it too, as is 45.1 and 38.8! Maybe it just flew
> > under my radar as I don't often reboot or quit Thunderbird.
> > 
> > 38.8 did have some feedback in the Activity Manager - something to the
> > effect of "finding which files to index" in a certain folder.
> 
> That would be "determining which messages to index".  There have been
> reports of issues related to this. Is it a gmail account?

There is a gmail account, among others. But keep in mind - this message only came up when reverting all the way back to 38.8.

Comment 10

[louis]

At this point, I believe Thunderbird is behaving itself again. I have not seen this issue for a couple of weeks now. Shortly after doing my experiments with reverting to earlier versions, v 50.0b3 seems be ok.

If I had to guess, I would say that Thunderbird was indexing messages and that was what I was seeing. But that is still just a big guess...

If you have suggestions on how to inspect things if it starts to happen again, I'd be glad to give more feedback. Thanks!

Louis

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Giedrius from comment #8)
> Issue is constant. Once or more times a day I see thunderbird using CPU at
> 100 percent. Users are working in a Terminal Server environment so extreme
> cpu usage is noticeable.  Today Į saw this problem in account which was
> using only IMAP. 

Anything happening in tools | activity manager?

https://mzl.la/2iyymrB is a list of bugs from last several years mentioning terminal server

Comment 12

[Giedrius]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #11)
> Anything happening in tools | activity manager?
Nothing. Users are working as usual. Only task manager show CPU 100% usage on one core.
 
> https://mzl.la/2iyymrB is a list of bugs from last several years mentioning
> terminal server
Nothing related.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you see better behavior if you install https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/38.8.0/win32/en-US/

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to louis from comment #10)
> ...
> 
> If you have suggestions on how to inspect things if it starts to happen
> again, I'd be glad to give more feedback. Thanks!
> 
> Louis

Louis, thanks for the feedback. After rereading "another thing that started with 45.4 that must have tipped me off to this - there is a huge lag between startup and the first window appearing during which time things got sluggish. That's probably a different ticket though." it sounds like you may have lost all the folder index files.

Yes, please provide new feedback if you see the problem again. But please create a new bug for your issue.

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Giedrius, can you get a performance profile as follows:

- follow instructions at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Remote_Debugging/Thunderbird
- pick "main"
- click "Performance" in the developer tool menu
- click "start recording performance" in the center
- do some actoins in thunderbird
- click "stop recording performance"  in the center
- click "Save" one the left
- email the json file or attach to this bug report

Comment 16

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard