1330872 - Thunderbird exceptionally high memory usage [meta]

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

The intention of this bug is to collect a subset high memory usage cases, starting roughly from the v3.0 era, that primarily happen without a *sequence* of user steps. Which is to say, cases where memory usage seemingly increases on its own, often quickly over a relatively short period of time.  And so the collection excludes some fairly well understood high memory use categories. Examples of excluded items:
- a set of user actions, such as selecting many message and moving them
- opening newsgroup folders (which can be exceptionally large)
- usage of Lightning addon with large calendars

High memory in this context means memory usage on the order of double or more of what might be expected, given the user's folder sizes, etc.  No assumption is made as to whether these bugs have anything in common, or are connected in any specific way, other than the symptom of high memory usage.  This list including already closed bugs.

Comment 1

[abolatto]

I am running the thunderbird client 52.7.0 (64-bit) under MacOS 10.10.5
When I launch Thunderbird it starts with a memory usage of 334.4 MB. This usage increases steadily, through small changes and sometimes big jumps, with no activity on my part. On this last restart it became 341.6 MB after 2 minutes. At 3 minutes it is 393.9 MB. At 10 minutes it is 456.7 MB. At 20 minutes it is 524.6 MB. I emphasize I have done nothing with my mail during this time: Thunderbird is running undisturbed. The memory usage becomes untenable after a few days of having the application open (I use it to compose and read email during that time), when it can take 6 GB or more of "wired" memory plus a significant amount of "compressed" memory, slowing down the machine to a crawl. At that point I have to restart Thunderbird. I maintain a large mailbox (over 41,000 messages) in gmail connected through IMAP.

Comment 2

[Worcester12345]

Just a quick note to say that memory use is a lot better recently. Short of the 5 open bug dependencies, or better definition of "high memory usage", this bug is almost "WORKSFORME".