751357 - Thunderbird version 12 extremely slow to display messages

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Harvey]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
Build ID: 20120420145725

Steps to reproduce:

I am experiencing obscenely slow behavior in TB 12, both versions 12.0.0 and 12.0.1.  I reverted back to version 11.0.1 and immediately saw the speed return to normal; i.e., instant loading of messages, moving from one message to another, displaying of multiple images, etc.  With 12, TB was so slow that often the term "not responding" would appear, eventually disappearing when whatever operation was underway, completed, generally **minutes**, (not seconds!), later.

The only problem that I experienced once a reverted back to 11 was that embedded links would no longer appear in blue, underlined text, although the link was, indeed, embedded and would access the proper web page when clicked upon.  In addition to the above, the cursor would not change from the vertical "I" beam to the hand, yet the link would appear at the bottom of the TB window when the cursor was placed on it.  (Haven't found a "fix" for this yet!)

BTW, the aforementioned problems occur in downloaded messages, forwarded messages and newly-created messages with embedded links.

So, decided to try a full download of v 12.0.1, which I loaded "over the top", (I did not uninstall TB first).  No difference in speed whatsoever; i.e., still slower 'n molasses in January!

Given that 12 is so bad, (I can't wait for literally minutes for a message to load), I am, once again, revert back to 11 and manually change the font color and style, (to underlined blue text).

Lastly, I should mention that this is occurring on two totally different machines of mine, both, however, with Windoze 7 Ultimate.  One machine is a dual-core machine with 4 Gb of RAM and an average video card.  The other machine, (my primary), is a very fast quad-core processor, 8 Gb of RAM and a moderately fast video card.

I have been using TB since the .9 Beta published in 2004, and I have never seen a problem this bad.  As a result, I have instructed to all of my clients to avoid upgrading to TB 12.x at all costs, sticking with 11 until this is rectified.


Actual results:

See above


Expected results:

Speed should be at least as fast as version 11.

Comment 1

[Hashem Masoud]

(In reply to Harvey from comment #0)
Also reported earlier in bug 750781.

Comment 2

[:aceman]

Can you see if there is CPU usage by Thunderbird in the period where it is "frozen"?

Comment 3

[Joe Sabash [:JoeS1]]

Do you have any anti virus programs installed.
I've seen this (on any tb version) when I installed Avira Antivir _with_ the ask.com searchbar option. Updater.exe seemed to conflict with TB causing huge CPU overhead. De-installing the "search" option from the Avira package fixed it for me.

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Something I observed recently on TB12 was that after a message is loaded into view, it sometimes took several minutes until I could use the scroll wheel to scroll that msg. However, I couldn't tell if that's a TB problem or not.

Comment 5

[Harvey]

To Everyone,

Thanks for the responses!

To Joe Sabash,

Anti-Virus is AVG version 2012.0.1913 fully updated
Firewall is Comodo (not including the Anti-Virus option!) is version 5.10.228257.2253

When going through the numerous re-installs of TB versions 11.x and 12.x, I deactivated AVG and shut down Comodo.

Also tried a completely clean install of both TB v 11 and 12 going so far as to removed all remnants of TB in the Registry, all to no avail.

To Thomas D.,

I also experienced a "freeze" whilst attempting to view any message, whether a message containing nothing but verbiage or with many graphic images.  During that period, TB was totally frozen in that moving to another message or using the scroll bar were impossible.  I also experienced minutes, not seconds, to display any message.  Had to be something serious!

To all,

Sorry for being so tardy in responding to your rapid responses. Been busy restoring a pre-TB version 12 drive image to solve the problems, in addition to my normal work. Just couldn't wait for a fix.

FWIW, I tried everything to solve the issues including clean installs of both 11 and 12, and things just went from bad to worse!  With so much messing around, it got the point where TB would not even launch!  As a result I had no choice but to revert to an earlier Drive Image which solved it all.

Now that I am back to TB version 11.0.1, everything is back to normal, fast with no link display problems either.

Bottom line is I will never know what caused the problems. As a Mechanical Engineer who is highly analytical, it troubles to me not to what the cause of the problems, but not being able to access my eMail was more than I could handle.  As I am certain you all can understand, I gotta a business to run and I am a "one-man-show" so I gotta do what I gotta do!

Once again, I thank you for your response and your offer to help!

Harvey

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

Is it mainly messages with links that are slow to display? Does a minimal message (one line of plain text) also take a long time to display?

If you create a new profile (run thunderbird with the -profilemanager command line option) and set up one of your e-mail accounts (are you using pop3?), do you still see the same slowness?

Comment 7

[Harvey]

David,

Thanks for the response!

It made no difference what size the messages were or whether or not the file size was large; i.e., contained graphics.  Small or large, it took **minutes** to display each message during which the program just plain froze.  Couldn't move the scroll bar, access other messages, nuttin'!

As for trying a new profile, I really apologize, but, as I said in my previous post, I've now reverted back to TB version 11.0.1 and all is well, the result being that I cannot test anything for you.  I use TB for business purposes and absolutely cannot be without it for even several hours. I lost all day yesterday as it was and, this morning am now able to play "catch-up" on business issues.

Sorry that I can't help more.  You may wish to look at the responses to my Mozillazine post.  There are others who've posted to my message experiencing the same problems.  Perhaps they can help.

Comment 8

[Aurélien]

Hello Harvey,

Take a look to our current discussion here : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=750781

Maybe that like me, you have 2 folders called "places.sqlite-wal" and "places.sqlite-shm" in the root directory of your profile. 
If yes, close thunderbird, and remove this 2 folders. (if it's 2 files, don't remove them, I will let more competent person answer you !)

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Aurélien from comment #8)
> Hello Harvey,
> 
> Take a look to our current discussion here :
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=750781
> 
> Maybe that like me, you have 2 folders called "places.sqlite-wal" and
> "places.sqlite-shm" in the root directory of your profile. 
> If yes, close thunderbird, and remove this 2 folders. (if it's 2 files,
> don't remove them, I will let more competent person answer you !)

Harvey?