Performance - Thunderbird: Difference between revisions

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Most performance problems are due to not [[Compacting folders | compacting]] the Inbox folder often enough. Deleted messages aren't physically deleted until the folder is compacted; they are merely hidden from view and marked for deletion. This means it might be loading a 1GB file when it displays an Inbox folder that appears to have only 50KB of messages.
Most performance problems are due to not [[Compacting folders | compacting]] the Inbox folder often enough. Deleted messages aren't physically deleted until the folder is compacted; they are merely hidden from view and marked for deletion. This means it might be loading a 1GB file when it displays an Inbox folder that appears to have only 50KB of messages.


Thunderbird appears to parse the contents of the entire Inbox folder when it fetches and stores new mail for POP accounts. If the folder contains messages with certain missing headers (typically due to spam or a corrupted folder) it can get caught in a loop. The workaround would be to move all of the Inbox folders messages to another folder (where you can identify and delete the troublesome messages later on) and compact the Inbox. In the worst case you might need to copy the messages in your Inbox to another folder, exit Thunderbird, [[Profile backup | back up]] your profile, delete both the "Inbox." and "Inbox.msf" files for that account in your [[Profile folder | profile]] and then run Thunderbird again. It will create a new empty Inbox folder if you do that.  
Thunderbird appears to parse the contents of the entire Inbox folder when it fetches and stores new mail for POP accounts. If the folder contains messages with certain missing headers (typically due to spam or a corrupted folder) it can get caught in a loop. The workaround (after first [[Profile backup | backing up]] your [[profile folder]]!) would be to move all of the Inbox folders messages to another folder (where you can identify and delete the troublesome messages later on) and compact the Inbox. In the worst case you might need to copy the messages in your Inbox to another folder, exit Thunderbird, [[Profile backup | back up]] your profile, delete both the "Inbox." and "Inbox.msf" files for that account in your [[Profile folder | profile]] and then run Thunderbird again. It will create a new empty Inbox folder if you do that.  


You might also defragment the drive and check that you have enough free memory that applications aren't being slowed down by constantly being moved to/from the swap file. You can decrease the amount of swapping by reducing the number of applications you're running and/or the number of programs in your system tray. It might also help to set the minimum and maximum size of the swap file to the same value.  
You might also defragment the drive and check that you have enough free memory that applications aren't being slowed down by constantly being moved to/from the swap file. You can decrease the amount of swapping by reducing the number of applications you're running and/or the number of programs in your system tray. It might also help to set the minimum and maximum size of the swap file to the same value.  

Revision as of 19:13, 26 May 2007

Problems

Most performance problems are due to not compacting the Inbox folder often enough. Deleted messages aren't physically deleted until the folder is compacted; they are merely hidden from view and marked for deletion. This means it might be loading a 1GB file when it displays an Inbox folder that appears to have only 50KB of messages.

Thunderbird appears to parse the contents of the entire Inbox folder when it fetches and stores new mail for POP accounts. If the folder contains messages with certain missing headers (typically due to spam or a corrupted folder) it can get caught in a loop. The workaround (after first backing up your profile folder!) would be to move all of the Inbox folders messages to another folder (where you can identify and delete the troublesome messages later on) and compact the Inbox. In the worst case you might need to copy the messages in your Inbox to another folder, exit Thunderbird, back up your profile, delete both the "Inbox." and "Inbox.msf" files for that account in your profile and then run Thunderbird again. It will create a new empty Inbox folder if you do that.

You might also defragment the drive and check that you have enough free memory that applications aren't being slowed down by constantly being moved to/from the swap file. You can decrease the amount of swapping by reducing the number of applications you're running and/or the number of programs in your system tray. It might also help to set the minimum and maximum size of the swap file to the same value.

Thunderbird uses an "xul.mfl" file in the profile to cache some of the data for the user interface. This is supposed to increase performance but sometimes that can get corrupted/bloated, and make things worse. The workaround is to exit Thunderbird and delete that file. Thunderbird will create a new one the next time you run it.

Why it's slower than the competition

Many Windows e-mail clients call the operating system (win32 API) to display the GUI, or call some wrapper that adds no significant overhead. Thunderbird uses XUL (Mozilla's XML-based User-interface Language) to display its GUI. This decreases performance but it allows users to write XUL extensions to extend the functionality, rather than having to write traditional plug-ins or ActiveX controls. There are over a hundred extensions available, most written by users.

Tweaking

There is a project to preload Firefox but there doesn't appear to be an equivalent for Thunderbird yet.

With v1.5RC2 and later under Windows you can set config.trim_on_minimize to false to have Thunderbird free most of its memory when you minimize it.

See also

External links