On 2/19/2014 10:48 AM, Juan Wei wrote:
Paul has written on 2/19/2014 12:43 AM:
Adam Kubias wrote:
On 2014-02-18 8:48 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 18:04:55 -0500, Silver Slimer wrote:

On 18/02/2014 5:33 PM, Adam Kubias wrote:

I have an even better computer. i7-4770 @3.40 GHz with 32 GB RAM.

Thunderbird is slow as hell, at least 5 times a day it totally freezes.

Holy ****. It freezes on THAT kind of a configuration? Jesus Christ it's
worse than awful isn't it?

You're assuming that Thunderbird is the one and only application ever
running on that system. That sort of assumes facts not in evidence, as a
lawyer buddy is fond of saying. Without knowing what else is running, you
can't come to a conclusion WRT Thunderbird.


Just posting this message takes 138 MB RAM. It's kind of a resource hog.

Just posting this message, takes 321MB of RAM.

But, there's a good reason for that. My biggest .msf
file is 48MB. All the .msf files are open right now, and
held in memory. That's the memory consumption. The fewer
or smaller the .msf, the smaller the memory footprint.

I can clean up the .msf files. If I delete .msf and .dat
for each newsgroup, they'll be re-created. And they will be
smaller (as only the current articles on the server, will
define the file content). My 48MB .msf, contains the headers
of the last five years of the newsgroup in question. Those
could be safely tossed.

I would be able to significantly reduce the 321MB figure that way.

*******

Another option, is recent versions of Thunderbird have a timer set
to five minutes, which closes unused .msf/.dat pairs. So if you
have newsgroups in your list, which you have not accessed in the
last five minutes, that amount of RAM won't be needed. These are
supposed to be the entries in Configuration Editor, that control the
behavior. The 300000 number is milliseconds, or five minutes.

mail.db.idle_limit 300000
mail.db.max_open

*******

Of course, a news client doesn't have to be designed this way.
Years ago, on a Unix box, I used a news client that kept only
an .rc file (keeps high_water, low_water, and tracks articles
which have been read, a string of numbers). The .rc file is tiny,
perhaps half a megabyte at the time. No record at all is kept
for each newsgroup. So the .msf/.dat pairs are totally unneeded.
Of course, the .msf/.dat pairs on Thunderbird, are capable of
keeping more history than the event horizon of the news server,
and you can debate whether that's an essential feature or not.
If I click on an old article in there, it doesn't load, because
it's no longer on the server. All I can see is headers of messages,
not the bodies.

You can debate whether the feature set of Thunderbird is wise,
but the memory consumption can be traced to how you're using
it. There are people who never clean mail folders, who use
2GB of RAM, but that's their fault.

The reason the files are kept in memory, is a performance
trade-off. On a slow computer, the initial parsing time for
a large .msf might be significant. The design decision is
to keep it in RAM. My experience here on my processor, is
that isn't an issue. If the files were not kept in memory,
it would only slow things down a little bit. If I was
running on a 300MHz Celeron, I would think otherwise.
I would load the newsgroups once in the morning, and
go make coffee while it happened.

If I set mail.db.max_open to "1", I expect that would
significantly reduce the memory footprint. I have plenty
of RAM, so it's a non-issue.

*******

I only consider a tool "broken", when no tuning knob is available.
I prefer that programs make good choices on their own, but when
a complicated program offers tuning adjustments, it's a second
best option. Now, if the Configuration Editor had popup
balloons to explain what the settings did, *that* would be
a good design. You have to comb the mozilla.org site, looking
for hints.


How about using Compact Folders?

Thunderbird is designed for the average user. The average user may
never know of the about:config, let alone have desire to change it.
Many of the parameters that routinely get changed in the about:config
are also set from the options menu. Some people are afraid to make
changes in the Options menu, because they do not know or afraid they
don't understand what the options do.

Remember there are still people who are not using email, part of them
are afraid to look at their computer cross-eyed, for fear on causing
something not to work.

I have a friend who has been using her computer for as long as I, yet
she has multiple photo programs each with their own copy of her
pictures. She is constantly having problems because she does not know a
thing about the internal working of the computer and the programs on the
computer. The last time I tried to help her, there were 5 gb free on
her 200 gb drive. Most of that was in picture files. I know she would
never look at the options of a program.

While I have occasionally made changes in the about:config, it is not
something that I access, or change frequently. I frequently make
changes in the Options.

Point, it is not cost effective to cater to the very small minority of
techies that use their systems and programs.