1860344 - High memory consumption of Thunderbird

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 185634

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[sysop]

Attachment: 20231021-024255.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0

Steps to reproduce:

Just start Thunderbird and do nothing.

(Maybe just scrolling around or browsing folders or e-mails.)

Actual results:

The memory consumption of Thunderbird is tremendous!

It abruptly (within less than 30 seconds) sways between around 600 MB, 8.8 GB and 13.2 GB! This is simply too much. Due to that huge amount of memory greediness. My notebook crashes frequently, because it exceeds my swap space and memory.

When freshly starting Thunderbird, it consumes 13.2 GB!
After a while, it consumes 8.8 GB!
Sometimes it only consumes around 600 MB.
Out of nowhere, it suddenly (within a few seconds) again consumes 13.2 GB, then 8.8 GB and then again 13.2 GB. This happens over and over again.

I know the tab about:memory in Thunderbird. When Thunderbird consumes 13.8 GB memory, I can trigger freeing the memory by e.g., clicking "Minimize memory usage". After clicking, the memory abruptly decreases from 8.8 or 13.8 GB to around 600 MB memory consumption. Unfortunately, this state does not stay very long. After a while, the memory consumption goes back to 8.8 or 13.8 GB. Usually, the consumption automatically jumps between 8.8 and 13.8 GB.

Even though, I have 32 GB memory in my notebook, this tremendous memory consumption is way too much for me, because this single program can consume more than a third of my whole memory. When I use other programs in parallel (which is always the case), Thunderbird regularly reaches and exceeds the maximum available system memory, causing my notebook to freeze or crash.

Sidenote:

My Thunderbird profile is quite big, namely: 4.595 items, totaling 9.3 GB
From this perspective, Thunderbird theoretically appears loading my entire Thunderbird user profile into memory (I hope this is not happening) and then even consumes additional GBs of memory.

Below, I have added a few screenshots, showing the varying memory consumption.

Expected results:

Thunderbird should consume at most 1 to 2 GB in my opinion.

Comment 1

[sysop]

Attachment: 20231021-024219.png

Comment 2

[sysop]

Attachment: 20231021-024246.png

Comment 3

[sysop]

Attachment: 20231021-024304.png

Comment 4

[sysop]

Attachment: memory-report.json.gz

Comment 5

[sysop]

I use 14 e-mail accounts in Thunderbird.

Comment 6

[sysop]

Attachment: memory-report2.json.gz (consuming 11.5 GB)

Comment 7

[sysop]

This problem with the tremendous memory consumption already occurred before Thunderbird 115.

Comment 8

[sysop]

Attachment: memory-report3.json.gz (consuming 13.2 GB)

Comment 9

[sysop]

Attachment: memory-report-with-13.3GB.txt

Comment 10

[sysop]

Attachment: verbose-memory-report-with-13.3GB.txt

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Please see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems

Does anything in bug 1240722 help?

Comment 12

[sysop]

I found out, what was causing the tremendous memory consumption. I had subscribed to about 50 newsgroups. Over the years, more and more messages were stored in these newsgroups (e.g., 20,000 for specific newsgroups). Even though around 96% of the newsgroup entries were text-only, the more newsgroups, I unsubscribed, the less memory Thunderbird consumed. I kept 5 newsgroups, but cleared them. Now, Thunderbird consumes memory varying between around 500 and 1000 MB. When Thunderbird frees memory, around 500 MB are used, which is the same as if I start Thunderbird in Troubleshoot mode.

I'm glad, everything is back to normal.

Even though, Thunderbird should definitely not hold all messages of newsgroups in memory.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for the great research. Your findings mean this is a duplicate of bug 185634