1531446 - Thunderbird indexer getting stuck "determining which inbox messages to index."

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[Greg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3626.119 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I deleted all of the indexing files believing that the index files may be corrupted.
I compact the folders at least once a day.

I restarted Thunderbird (up to date on version: 60.5.2 (32-bit). After about an hour of watching the activity log, all of the indexing was completed, but the indexer seemed to be reporting that it was "determining which inbox messages to index" and never stopping. There is high CPU and fan use during this time.

The inbox has 281 messages and varies from 250 to about 300 or so. The inbox folder is huge for some reason: 161 MB.

I have tried to repair the folder and have deleted all of the MSF files numerous times. Nothing seems to fix the stuck indexer.

Actual results:

The activity logger reports "determining which inbox messages to index" and never ends until I end Thunderbird. Restarting keeps this quiet for a few minutes but eventually returns to the same state: "determining which inbox messages to index."

Expected results:

Indexer should stop determining which inbox messages to index and close.

For now, I have disabled global indexing and there are no more high CPU or fan incidents, but I cannot index or search messages.

Comment 1

[Stephan Sokolow]

I also experienced what appears to be the same problem, but I missed the existence of Tools > Options > Advanced > Enable Global Search and Indexer and other efforts to stop this failed (eg. "Can I right-click in the Activity Manager and force the task to abort? No", "Is there an extension responsible for this that I can kill? No")

Having had this tying up 20-30% of my CPU for weeks on end (I sometimes leave my desktop session logged in for multiple months, un-interrupted) and not realizing the workaround until now, when I was going to report it, this became one of several big reasons I'm currently looking for a replacement to Thunderbird. (The others being bug 1580793, bug 1580796, and random other creaks and groans that just left me with low confidence in it.)

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Stephan,
Do you still experience this issue?
Do you have RSS accounts?

Comment 3

[Stephan Sokolow]

No, it seems to have gotten solved.

...but of a shame though, given that I'm now making plans to investigate a switch from Thunderbird to Kontact or Claws Mail to complement my imminent "I don't trust what Mozilla is doing to the privacy/personal information parts of their ToS" migration from Firefox to LibreWolf.

Comment 4

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

Thanks for your feedback, Stephan.