1591796 - Thunderbird for Mac runs at 100% and eats all memory

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Claudio C.]

Attachment: Thunderbird check-up.pdf

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

Steps to reproduce:

Start Thunderbird

Actual results:

Soon after launch, ThB starts working at 100% CPU , eats all the memory (up to 9 GB over 8 GB !) Then it runs at low CPU (1-2%) still using all the memory and blocking the whole system. Stays like that a few minutes, then starts releasing memory and running again at high CPU, till all goes back to normal. Then, shortly afterwards or after a few minutes, the cycle starts again. When this happens, the completion bar at the bottom of the window indicates an ongoing process.

Expected results:

Normal ThB operation

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

What changed just before this behavior began

Comment 2

[Claudio C.]

I have a 21.5 inches iMac of late 2013 with 8 GB RAM. The OS is High Sierra V. 10.13.6.

I cannot really tell what changed before this behaviour because it crept in progressively.
About a month ago, TB and the system started going slow - though still remaining operative - with frequent warnings of high and critical memory pressure from the Memory Diag app. This was a bit annoying, but I blamed for it my old HW - and perhaps insufficient memory - and I kept working. However, things got worse and worse over time up to the point that 10 day ago 1) TB became unusable, 2) the system became a slug when TB is running.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Not really my first choice but it is the easiest, with Thunderbird shut down try renaming global-messages-db.sqlite in the profile.

Comment 4

[Claudio C.]

I did it. No improvement.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

What happens with
thunderbird -offline

And please post the top section listing your accounts at Help > Troubleshooting

Comment 6

[Claudio C.]

TB behaves smoothly with thunderbird -offline

Below is the the listing of my accounts (sorry for the Italian)

Account di posta e news
ID Server in entrata Server in uscita
Nome Sicurezza della connessione Metodo di autenticazione Nome Sicurezza della connessione Metodo di autenticazione Predefinito?
account1 (none) Local Folders plain passwordCleartext
account3 (imap) relay.poste.it:143 plain passwordCleartext smtp-tls.myquix.de:587 alwaysSTARTTLS passwordCleartext true
account7 (imap) imap.googlemail.com:993 SSL passwordCleartext smtp.googlemail.com:465 SSL passwordCleartext true
account8 (imap) imapmail.libero.it:143 plain passwordEncrypted smtp.libero.it:25 plain passwordEncrypted true
account9 (imap) imap.myquix.de:993 SSL passwordCleartext smtp-tls.myquix.de:587 alwaysSTARTTLS passwordCleartext true
account10 (imap) imap.gmail.com:993 SSL OAuth2 smtp.googlemail.com:465 SSL passwordCleartext true
account13 (imap) imap.gmail.com:993 SSL OAuth2 smtp.gmail.com:465 SSL OAuth2 true
account14 (imap) imap.gmail.com:993 SSL OAuth2 smtp.gmail.com:465 SSL OAuth2 true

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

TB behaves smoothly with thunderbird -offline

Perhaps then related to getting or checking for new mail.
Do you see the problem if started in safe mode? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/safe-mode-thunderbird

Comment 8

[Claudio C.]

I already tried to run TB in safe mode before reporting the bug.
Now, I updated TB to 68.3.0 and tried again in safe mode unsuccessfully.

However, I happened to start FB off-line and then switched to on-line. It worked smoothly for several hours!

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I would suspect a bad folder

Comment 10

[Claudio C.]

What does it mean?

Comment 11

[Claudio C.]

I upgraded the OS from High Sierra (10.13) to Mojave (10.14). TB has been running smoothly for 2 dyas now.

Problem solved!

As the problem surfaced 2-3 months ago, I wander whether it is connected to the release 60.9 of TB.

Thank you, Wayne, for your attention.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for the update