653964 - Thunderbird uses up all the bandwidth

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Abhishek Singh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110428 Fedora/3.1.10-1.fc14 Lightning/1.0b3pre Thunderbird/3.1.10

I'm using Thunderbird 3.1.10 with lightning and enigmail addon. When I open thunderbird, it starts consuming all of my bandwidth and hence other network traffic (e.g. web browsing, chatting etc) is affected by a lot. I confirmed the network bandwidth usage through the "NetHogs" tool output as well. I have the same build of TB and aforementioned addons running on another machine (but on another network), it works perfectly well. I've created accounts the default way and I am using IMAP. TB is set to check mails at startup and at every 10min intervals.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Thunderbird and allow it to run while doing other Internet stuffs.

Actual Results:  
Thunderbird seems to use up all the bandwidth and other network traffic is degraded. It seems to use all the bandwidth even if it's not checking for new mails, and hence uses high bandwidth constantly.

Expected Results:  
It should have shared the bandwidth with other applications.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

You may want to consider switching off synchronization for your accounts in
Edit > Account Settings > (account) > Synchronization & Storage, the first checkbox on the top of that window. If it is currently activated, it will download and locally mirror all messages for off-line use. Bandwidth use should go down after that process has finished, but may be a problem if you receive large amounts of messages with a limited connection bandwidth. 

There is bug 506024 pending on establishing a configurable bandwidth policy beyond the current on/off switch. If that's your primary concern, I would resolve your bug as a duplicate of the other one. Unfortunately, I don't see a solution coming up for the next TB 3.3 major release.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

> It seems to use all the bandwidth even if it's not checking for new mails, and hence uses high bandwidth constantly.

this observation is counterintutive, *unless* it is redownloading already downloaded mail.

Abhishek, please comment further on this observation. And the results of testing rsx11m's suggestion. Also, what type of connection do you use, at what bandwidth?

Comment 3

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

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