1493562 - Extremely high ram usage when moving a large amount of emails

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 583365

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Matthew Stapleton]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.75 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I moved 20000 or more old imap emails (mostly just alerts and info from servers) from the inbox folder to a brand new empty archive folder.


Actual results:

After syncing the emails to the new archive folder, Thunderbird spends around 15 to 30 minutes at 100% single thread CPU usage and during this time gradually allocates more and more ram until it is using an extremely large amount of ram (around 5GB extra ram usage for around 20000 emails and even more as the number of emails to move increases) before finally freeing up all the cpu and ram usage and syncing the move operation with the imap server.


Expected results:

Thunderbird should have been able to apply the move operation fairly quickly without using all my ram.

Global Search and Indexer is disabled and Message Store Type is mbox.  I also tried Safe mode and the problem occurred there as well.  System is CPU: i7-4700HQ CPU @ 2.40GHz with RAM: 16GB, and running Gentoo Linux.  I am also using the Mozilla build of Thunderbird to rule out issues with compiling from source.  I haven't tried a completely new profile yet either to see if that fixes the problem.

The inbox has around 360400 emails, but most of them are small.  The total main Thunderbird INBOX file size is 5.9GB and the INBOX.msf size is 622MB.

Would changing to maildir format be likely to fix this issue?

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Matthew Stapleton from comment #0)
> ... 
> Would changing to maildir format be likely to fix this issue?

I dont' think so.

You are looking at bug 583365 or bug 693659, or a combination of the two.