1384913 - after several days Thunderbird compose typing becomes slow

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Joseph Picone]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.115 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Thunderbird response becomes very slow after using it for several days:

- I use a Mac (Sierra) with a large email archive in IMAP
- after several days Thunderbird (v52.2.1) becomes slow (interactive response
  becomes slow, characters are echoed a second or two after typing, frequent
  spinning dial showing Thunderbird is busy)
- I restart Thunderbird in safe mode
- exit and restart Thunderbird in normal mode
- everything is fine

Compacting folders does not make the problem go away, but safe mode does. No other tools on my laptop have this latency when this occurs - it is specific to Thunderbird.


Actual results:

Thunderbird is slow to respond. Characters in a compose email window are echoed seconds after typing them. The spinning colored wheel is displayed frequently (showing Thunderbird to be busy) is displayed randomly and frequently.

The latency makes it difficult to work fast an causes errors because you can't type at normal speeds.


Expected results:

I have reported this before. The key piece here is that Safe Mode seems to do something to mitigate the problem. I have a large inventory of email split between multiple accounts, local and IMAP folders. This problems seems to have arisen within the last 6 months (I have used Thunderbird for at least 10 years - a long time). It is a serious issue now since it happens every few days.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems has a detailed list of steps/items. You can of course ignore the ones that are Windows specific. Please post your detailed results once you have gone through the full list.

Comment 2

[Joseph Picone]

I looked at the long lost of things you suggested. It is a lot of work to go through all those steps. I have been using the same Thunderbird set up for years. The add-ons I use are Copy Folder, ImportExport Tools, Manually Sort Folders, OpenAttachmentsBy Extension, Quiktext and Send Later. The next time it happens I will try some of the things you suggested.

This problem only started occurring recently (last 6 months). I have not changed anything in my Thunderbird setup.

-Joe

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

> This problem only started occurring recently (last 6 months)
That should equate to starting in version 45.something

>  The next time it happens I will try some of the things you suggested.
Also check how much memory and CPU Thunderbird is using when slow and report those numbers.

Until then, we don't have actionable information. We can reopen this when there is.