Thunderbird and firefox very slow to start

[marek_online]

Hi,

There may be nothing can be done about this, but since I upgraded to Feisty both thunderbird (2.0) and firefox take a very long time to start (about 20 seconds, sometimes more).

I've tried prelink but neither use ELF executables, so it doesn't have any effect. I've also tried swiftfox instead of firefox, but it takes just as long to start.

Is there anything can be done?

They both run fine once they have loaded.

[davidlondon]

Re: Thunderbird and firefox very slow to start

Hi,

Both applications are memory hogs and take a while to start. If you have over 500Mb of RAM then then maybe check in console with 'free -m' to see how much swap your system is using.

[marek_online]

Re: Thunderbird and firefox very slow to start

Hi,

Both applications are memory hogs and take a while to start. If you have over 500Mb of RAM then then maybe check in console with 'free -m' to see how much swap your system is using.

Yeah, I knew they were demanding alright. But they run fine once loaded, so I hoped it wasn't just the bloat that caused the slow loading times. The machine has 750MB or so of ram, so it isn't swapping is the problem.

free -m gives me some rather ironic results. Before launching thunderbird I've 7MB of free memory and 343MB cached. After loading there is more free memory (slightly): 10MB, with less cached.

Ah well. Worth a shot. Guess I'll just have to be patient. (using alternatives isn't an option, unfortunately)

[sky]

Re: Thunderbird and firefox very slow to start

Maybe you can use prelink. It's a tool which is prelinking binaries and libraries to get a faster startup...
To install :

sudo apt-get install prelink

To launch (after upgrades for example)

sudo prelink -avmR

Hope it helps