462013 - Random Lockups with high memory While Idle or Composing Mail

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Jon R. Kibler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.20.1
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.17 (20080914)

This bug appears to be related to BID 442674

For no apparent reason, Thunderbird suddenly starts reading disk and sucking up memory, becoming totally unresponsive, giving the spinning color wheel of death. If you leave it sit long enough, it will eventually resume working as if nothing had happened. Sometimes it will crash, with the same 'bus error' in BID 442674.

Configuration:
  About 50 imap mail boxes with local replication.
  Folder compression is turned off.

I have attached an example from 'top' showing the problem. (I deleted the first 2 hours of output, where everything was working normally.) In this particular case, I was working offline. I was composing an email when Thunderbird simply froze. I could not type anything and I got the spinning color wheel. After about 45 minutes, everything went back to 'normal' as if nothing happened. (I stopped top from running long before then.)

When Thunderbird starts this I/O frenzy, just about everything else drags to a stop. It becomes next to impossible to even change desktops.

This is getting to be such a major pain -- it happens 1 to 3+ times a day, usually while composing email -- that I am about to abandon Thunderbird and go with the Mac mail client which I really hate.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jon R. Kibler]

Attachment: Contains output from top showing memory, CPU, and I/O usage during problem

I started top when I started Thunderbird. It ran for a couple of hours before the problem started. I deleted all but a couple of entries before the problem started and killed top long before the problem finally corrected itself.

Comment 2

[Jon R. Kibler]

Another pattern I have noticed. This seems to happen more frequently when I do the following:

1) New mail is in inbox
2) Move some email to trash without reading it
3) Optional: Go Offline
4) Start a reply to a message in the inbox
5) About 2 to 4 minutes into the typing is when it will freeze up

Comment 3

[Jon R. Kibler]

I was able to get this issue to improve by erasing my Sent mailbox, which prior to erasing had about 4500 messages.

Also, compressing folders 2 or 3 times a day seems to help some too.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Jon, can you still reproduce with current version 3.0?
If so, can you provide a shark profile while it's using CPU during compose?
  https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Profiling_JavaScript_with_Shark

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

sounds like less major, based on comment 3.
however, 4500 messages really isn't a lot.
where there really big threads in that folder (many messages with the same subject)?

Comment 6

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE due to lack of response to last question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond with your reasons why.