217324 - Excessive processor utilization in main Thunderbird mail window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 224381

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Wilson Bilkovich]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030825 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030825 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1+

Running Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2a (20030822), but easy to duplicate in other
recent snapshots/milestones/etc.
The main symptom is that the mouse cursor moves very sluggishly in the main
Thunderbird window. If Thunderbird is the foreground application, simply moving
the mouse (rapidly, back and forth makes things very obvious indeed) across the
list of messages in the Inbox uses up to 70% of the CPU resources on this
Pentium 4 2.0GHz with 1GB of DDR memory. (Dell OptiPlex GX260)  Moving the mouse
across the button toolbar at the top does not produce this effect.
Similarly, resizing the Thunderbird window with the handle at the bottom right
will quickly produce 100% utilization. Windows XP SP1, Matrox G550 video with
driver release 5.88.061.  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch Thunderbird and open Task Manager to the Performance tab.
2. Move mouse back and forth across the list of messages in a mail folder.
3. Profit.

Actual Results:  
Extremely high CPU utilization.

Expected Results:  
Been friendlier to other running processes.

Problem occurs even in optimized nightly builds of Thunderbird; at least so far.

Comment 1

[Ion Chalmers Freeman]

I have this even worse. Powerpoint, Word and Opera were all behaving extremely 
sluggishly. Even the task manager took a long time to come up. When it did, it 
reported Thunderbird was taking 99 % of my 1.4 GHz processor. All it should have 
been doing was checking my IMAP server for mail every now and then!

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 224381 ***