887613 - 35% CPU downloading gmail imap folder using slow EDGE 2.5G (<=28KB/sec) connection

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[Aurosutru]

Attachment: CPU usage.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/25.0.1364.160 Chrome/25.0.1364.160 Safari/537.22

Steps to reproduce:

New installation of Ubuntu 13.04.  Set up gmail imap account.


Actual results:

Starts long download of 388 MB in mail folders.  Due to slow EDGE 2.5G Internet connection available in this area the download process has taken several days and still is not complete.  

During the download CPU usage goes to about 35% using all four cores of a fast quad-core notebook, even when little downloading is taking place.  Please see attached file.

Sending new mail is difficult because the download of Sent Mail running in the background grabs the Internet bandwidth, especially when TB tries to save new sent mail to the Sent Mail folder, which fails. 

Archiving emails over 1MB in Gmail doesn't seem to help streamline the download to TB.


Expected results:

Activity manager should report what's happening and allow the download activity to be paused or cancelled during a session.

CPU usage should be much lower.

Sending new email and updating to the Sent Mail box should have priority over background downloading.

Mails archived in Gmail should not be downloaded to the Inbox and Sent mail boxes in TB.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Aurosutru from comment #0)
> New installation of Ubuntu 13.04.  Set up gmail imap account.
> 
> Actual results:
> 
> Starts long download of 388 MB in mail folders.  Due to slow EDGE 2.5G
> Internet connection available in this area the download process has taken
> several days and still is not complete.  

On new install of Thunderbird you should have seen advice downloading/syncing where you could adjust what gets downloaded

> During the download CPU usage goes to about 35% using all four cores of a
> fast quad-core notebook, even when little downloading is taking place. 
> Please see attached file.
This would be due to indexing

> Sending new mail is difficult because the download of Sent Mail running in
> the background grabs the Internet bandwidth, especially when TB tries to
> save new sent mail to the Sent Mail folder, which fails. 

The slowness of sending and draft saves can be altered by changing draft folder to a local folder and/or disabling sync in your Thunderbird account settings.

> Archiving emails over 1MB in Gmail doesn't seem to help streamline the
> download to TB.

Archive mails are still downloaded to local PC

> Expected results:
> 
> Activity manager should report what's happening 
download and index activity is sown.

> allow the download activity to be paused or cancelled during a session.

there is an existingbug reported on this part

Comment 2

[Aurosutru]

Wayne,

Thanks for the advice. By restricting synchronization in Account Settings the main problem of long, slow downloads of big, old emails seems to be solved.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Aurosutru, Is this a laptop? If so, what model and make?

Perhaps hardware factors are causing this huge quantity of mail to take longer to download than it should, and increasing the load on the PC? 

Do we know anyone who uses GSM or something like it?

Comment 4

[Aurosutru]

Wayne,

The hardware is an Asus K55A laptop with Intel 3630QM quad-core CPU.  The hardware is much more capable than the EDGE 2.5G connection, which peaks at about 28 KB/sec.

If memory serves, my previous Dell Latitude with a Pentium M CPU also went into high gear, maybe 90% CPU usage, when trying to retrieve mail from Gmail into TB using the same slow connection.

Perhaps your question about GSM refers to 3G, which is not yet widely available in rural India.  EDGE is still far more common for most of the population.  EDGE is also a GSM flavor.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

potentially not gmail related, but just in case - link to bug 402793

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Aurosutru from comment #2)
> Wayne,
> 
> Thanks for the advice. By restricting synchronization in Account Settings
> the main problem of long, slow downloads of big, old emails seems to be
> solved.

What exactly did you change?
And, please compare and tell us CPU usage on version 17 vs version 24 for similar download.


I'm not finding bug in [1] to dupe to, but I thought we had one or more bugs about perf issue on slow connections.  And I'm not sure this situation can be improved. However, it's worth investigating IMO rather than just closing WFM 

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?f1=OP&o3=anywordssubstr&list_id=8346091&short_desc=network%20connect&v3=perf&classification=Client%20Software&classification=Components&o2=anywordssubstr&f4=CP&query_format=advanced&j1=OR&f3=keywords&f2=short_desc&short_desc_type=anywordssubstr&component=Backend&component=Networking&component=Networking%3A%20IMAP&component=Networking%3A%20POP&component=OS%20Integration&component=Untriaged&v2=slow&product=MailNews%20Core&product=Thunderbird

Comment 7

[Aurosutru]

Through Ubuntu's auto-upgrades I am now running T-Bird 24.  Performance is now acceptable, with only a few percent of CPU activity during downloads on a slow EDGE connection.

Your advice indicating that large files can be eliminated from downloads in the user preferences helped speed up the whole process at the expense of missing some big files locally in T-Bird, but those I can view individually in Gmail if necessary.

THANKS.

Comment 8

[Aurosutru]

Through Ubuntu's auto-upgrades I am now running T-Bird 24.  Performance is now acceptable, with only a few percent of CPU activity during downloads on a slow EDGE connection.

Your advice indicating that large files can be eliminated from downloads in the user preferences helped speed up the whole process at the expense of missing some big files locally in T-Bird, but those I can view individually in Gmail if necessary.

THANKS.