553162 - Memory footprint of Thunderbird is very high

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[Ittay Dror]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.1.249.1030 Safari/532.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100227 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.3

I have both Thunderbird and Outlook 2007 running. Both have email and calendar accounts configured and I'm using both actively. I have several add-ons, but none of them looks like it should add memory overhead.

Thunderbird takes 900MB with 600MB resident

Outlook takes 515MB with 60MB resident

I think thunderbird takes way too much memory. 

Please don't dismiss this bug with "please start thunderbird with a fresh profile". As a user, what I see is Thunderbird taking too much memory. Even if there's an extension to blame, I think it should be easy for users to find that extension. And, as stated, I don't think it is any extension.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Hi Ittay. You won't need to create a new profile. But you will need to run through the steps at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems and report your results here. Please do not skip any steps.

Comment 2

[Ittay Dror]

The profile is not on a network drive, there's no antivirus software and firewall is turned off. 

I do use gmail. How do I unsubscribe from "All Mail"?

I will try the other steps later

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

> unsubscribe from "All Mail"

Ittay, does http://email.about.com/od/gmailtips/qt/et_hide_in_imap.htm work for you?

note also, the memory column you want to pay attention to in XP is "Mem Usage" (or Working Set in Vista)

Comment 4

[Ittay Dror]

didn't work for me
(In reply to comment #3)
> > unsubscribe from "All Mail"
> 
> Ittay, does http://email.about.com/od/gmailtips/qt/et_hide_in_imap.htm work for
> you?
> 
> note also, the memory column you want to pay attention to in XP is "Mem Usage"
> (or Working Set in Vista)

Comment 5

[Ittay Dror]

I followed the steps in the article: 
* Starting thunderbird, it uses 413M, 276M resident. hiding all mail and archiving mails in gmail made no difference (after restarting thunderbird)
* safe mode dropped memory usage to 307M, 209M resident. I will look into my extensions, but 307M on startup is still way too high. 
* all other checks are negative. i did not try to log the db diagnostics (step 11), tell me if this is crucial


(In reply to comment #1)
> Hi Ittay. You won't need to create a new profile. But you will need to run
> through the steps at
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems and report
> your results here. Please do not skip any steps.

Comment 6

[Ittay Dror]

it seems that every message touched increases memory. so that if i mark all messages in the trash folder and delete them, TB's memory increases by 200M. Same for 'remove duplicates'

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> I followed the steps in the article: 
> * Starting thunderbird, it uses 413M, 276M resident. hiding all mail and
> archiving mails in gmail made no difference (after restarting thunderbird)
> * safe mode dropped memory usage to 307M, 209M resident. I will look into my
> extensions, but 307M on startup is still way too high. 
> * all other checks are negative. i did not try to log the db diagnostics (step
> 11), tell me if this is crucial

Suggest the following:
1. try 3.1 candidate build http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/3.1rc1-candidates/build2/unsigned/win32/en-US/ (you'll need to update lightning)
2. if candidate build doesn't substantially help, then do the msgdb log
3. list your extensions (100+MB sounds like a lot)

Comment 8

[Ittay Dror]

(In reply to comment #7)
> (In reply to comment #5)
> > I followed the steps in the article: 
> > * Starting thunderbird, it uses 413M, 276M resident. hiding all mail and
> > archiving mails in gmail made no difference (after restarting thunderbird)
> > * safe mode dropped memory usage to 307M, 209M resident. I will look into my
> > extensions, but 307M on startup is still way too high. 
> > * all other checks are negative. i did not try to log the db diagnostics (step
> > 11), tell me if this is crucial
> 
> Suggest the following:
> 1. try 3.1 candidate build
> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/3.1rc1-candidates/build2/unsigned/win32/en-US/
> (you'll need to update lightning)

no difference

> 2. if candidate build doesn't substantially help, then do the msgdb log

ok, next time i have some free time...

> 3. list your extensions (100+MB sounds like a lot)

compact header
gmail conversation view
lightening
lookout
nightly tester tools
provider for google calendar
remove duplicate messages (alternate)
show inout

Comment 9

[selander]

geez, what a convoluted system....

Anyway, I am on OSX 10.5.8 running TBird 3.0.5. After launch, memory usage climbed to 1gb in a matter of minutes... all available memory. Might have gone higher if I had more memory (2gb, Mac Pro Core Duo -- not core2 duo -- chip). Following instructions found on forum (Does problem resolve by disabling global indexing?) I turned off indexing, and YES the problem seems resolved. However, I upgraded to 3 to get better searching.... would love to have the bug fixed.... thanks

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

selander in comment #9
> would love to have the bug fixed
ditto!

selander, is version 3.1 better even with indexing enabled?

Comment 11

[selander]

not wanting to break a working system, I have not upgraded to 3.1  I'll try the upgrade if it is supposed to have fixed this issue. Do you know if 3.1 addressed this problem?

(In reply to comment #10)
> selander in comment #9
> > would love to have the bug fixed
> ditto!
> 
> selander, is version 3.1 better even with indexing enabled?

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #11)
> not wanting to break a working system, I have not upgraded to 3.1  I'll try the
> upgrade if it is supposed to have fixed this issue. Do you know if 3.1
> addressed this problem?

we don't have details about the circumstances/cause of your situation, so it is impossible to say whether it is definitely fixed in 3.1. The best anyone can say, is that version 3.1 does have several performance fixes that *might* help. And if it doesn't help, we will be in a better position to help diagnose your issue if you are on version 3.1.

question: do you have any pop-based mail accounts?

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Ittay, I forgot to mention in my last comment, that you should measure results with thunderbird started in safe mode https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Itta, if you don't get below 250MB with the following disabled 
 gmail conversation view
 lightening
 lookout
and lightning enabled, please provide msgdb log. thanks

Comment 15

[Ittay Dror]

I disabled these and Thunderbird starts with 450M, of which 360M are resident. 

How do I send msgdb logs?

Comment 16

[Ittay Dror]

(where do i find the msgdb logs)

Comment 17

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #15)
> I disabled these and Thunderbird starts with 450M, of which 360M are resident. 
> 
> How do I send msgdb logs?

start up thunderbird with msgdb:5 per https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging
document the amount of memory being used, and the size of the folder you have open, shutdown, and then attach the log to the bug as a file at "Add an attachment".

Comment 18

[Ittay Dror]

Attachment: msgdb log

Comment 19

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 483084 [details]
msgdb log

bienvenu, log shows 18 dbs open.

(In reply to comment #18)
> Created attachment 483084 [details]
> msgdb log

Ittay sez log was done with "3.1.4 I think. I am now in 3.1.6 and the footprint is still high (745M virtual, 485M resident). I didn't use the quick search during logging."

Comment 20

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

actually 16

Comment 21

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Ittay, please install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/9695/ in thunderbird and post a screen shot of View > ViewAbout > About:Memory

Comment 22

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #15)
> I disabled these and Thunderbird starts with 450M, of which 360M are resident. 

Ittay, Please post memory usage operating version 3.1.7 for several minutes in *safe mode* - and not using any "Search all Messages".  https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

360M sounds high, but perhaps not horrible. 


Also, what's the disk size of the 3 largest files for your largest folders?
\Mail\smart mailboxes\Archives.msf 
\Mail\smart mailboxes\Drafts.msf 
\Mail\smart mailboxes\Inbox.sbd\Unified.msf 
\Mail\smart mailboxes\Junk.msf 
\Mail\smart mailboxes\Trash.msf 
\ImapMail\imap.gmail.com\INBOX.msf - 46 hdrs in use
\Mail\News & Blogs\Archives.msf 
\Mail\News & Blogs\Archives.sbd\2009.msf 
\Mail\News & Blogs\Archives.sbd\2010.msf 
\Mail\News & Blogs\Articles.msf 
\Mail\News & Blogs\Trash.msf 
\Mail\News & Blogs\Trash.sbd\feeditems-1.rdf.msf 
\Mail\News & Blogs\Java.msf 
\Mail\News & Blogs\People.msf 
\Mail\News & Blogs\Scala.msf

Comment 23

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

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