849256 - Thunderbird freezes, taking up 100% CPU and ever increasing memory

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Alex]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0
Build ID: 20130218165301

Steps to reproduce:

My issue has been discussed in bug 793792. I commented on that post that I had the same problem but was advised by Wayne Mery to file a new bug.

I visited a website with FF while TB was running in the background. 


Actual results:

TB hung and slowed everything down, so I had to do a Force Quit. FF kept running slow. After a restart of the PC, I opened TB and it hung almost immediately.

I just did an experiment (which I can repeat in variations if you want me to): When I started TB I had system monitor running. FF was already running. TB started and when I clicked on a random email it shot CPU usage up to 100% for one CPU. Memory usage was steadily rising, extending into swap. I killed TB but memory usage didn't drop until later.

Trying to repeat the experiment but TB isn't doing me the favor of hanging again.

Back when I have more.


Expected results:

It shouldn't have frozen :-)

Comment 1

[Alex]

Forgot to mention I am running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. According to the previous thread (793792) the issue also arises with 12.04

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

does problem reproduce if you delete .msf files?

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Alex, please be sure to be running an current version (eg 17 or newer). And see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems

Comment 4

[Alex]

Hi Wayne!

I am running TB 17.0.4 and I read your suggested reading, but the problem has not appeared again... If it does I will try deleting the .msf files and get back to you.

Thanks for the help,

Alex

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for the feedback. Please comment in the bug if it does happen again.

Comment 6

[graham]

I am having the same problem. With Ubuntu 12.04 Thunderbird hangs (goes grey) after about 5 mins even when doing nothing. It sometimes comes back after ~20 mins. CPU goes to 100% on one core and memory rises to ~400MB when problem occuring (drops back to ~200MB if recovering). Have tried using Ubuntu 12.10 and running in safe mode, but still greys out. Result is that Thunderbird is quite unusable! Any suggestions for an alternative e-mail client?