Thunderbird very slow

[Eric Weir]

I'm a bit new to K/Ubuntu, and am pretty disappointed in the degraded performance of Thunderbird on my system compared to my Windows system, which I want to leave behind.

Everything is delayed. E.g., right-click, and you have to wait for the menu to show up. Scroll a menu, and it's similarly delayed. Then the message list bounces around in a way that makes it difficult to see where you are, or to find find anything. Likewise, when Thunderbird is running but minimized to the panel, when I maximize it the pieces of the main application window come together slowly. It always does, of course, but sometimes I wonder if it's gonna come together.

I've tried Evolution, Kmail, and Opera. They don't behave the same way. Scrolling is immediate and precise. But there are other things that make them unnattractive. [E.g., the first time made a simple configuration change in Kmail it crashed.]

I've been using Thunderbird a couple-three years now, and I'd really like to stick with it, but this behavior is very irritating.

I assume this is not other people's experience. Any suggestions as to what might be going on? What I might do?

[dacap06]

Re: Thunderbird very slow

Eric --

You are right - I don't know of anyone else experiencing this problem with Thunderbird. I don't normally use Thunderbird myself - I prefer Evolution (which uses the same email file format so importing is easy). I just installed Thunderbird on my system to see for myself and it works fine for me - but dealing with only 4 messages in my mailbox is a trivial case and is not really comparable to your situation. That said, it tells me that the base install is OK and Thunderbird starts out with no issues.

Since you say other applications on your system do not exhibit this kind of slowness, I suspect (as do you, obviously) that it must be something about Thunderbird itself. So the question is: what is different about your Thunderbird installation?

Perhaps you have an unusual configuration. How is your configuration set? Specifically, what choices have you made in each panel and tab of the Thunderbird preferences? What are your folder properties? What are your account settings (don't list actual account names or passwords)? Are your mail files on a disk on the local machine or a networked disk? How full is the partition? If the disk is networked, what is the transport method - SMB? NFS? How did your import your messages from previous Thunderbird installations into this one?

Is Thunderbird drowning in data? The larger the mail files, the slower Thunderbird responds because it must handle more data with each operation. How big are your mail files (both in terms of size and number of messages)? How many mailboxes are installed? Are the indexes so huge that they cause swapping?

Perhaps it is the way you use it. When was the last time you compacted your folders? Do you actually delete messages, or are they just hidden?

I can't tell how much Unix/Linux you know from your message. If you don't know how to get some of this information, email me privately and I'll explain it.

That's all I can think of for now. Maybe when I see where these answers lead, I will have more insight.

-- DaCAP

[GS2]

Re: Thunderbird very slow

I had a similar problem - only with thunderbird when trying to access an SMTP connection on port 465, and migrated to Claws-Mail:

http://www.claws-mail.org/

Very 'light' and quick - you have to add the repository and the key - follow the guide here if you want to give it a try (backup your original /etc/apt/sources.list )

http://www.claws-mail.org/downloads....tion=downloads

Not a solution to your problem, but you may like the Claws-Mail MTA instead

[Eric Weir]

Re: Thunderbird very slow

Eric --

Since you say other applications on your system do not exhibit this kind of slowness, I suspect (as do you, obviously) that it must be something about Thunderbird itself. So the question is: what is different about your Thunderbird installation?

Just a quick acknowledgement of appreciation for now, DaCAP. Some questions I can answer without checking, several that will require some checking.

FYI, I'm brand new to K/Ubuntu and Linux. I'll never be a geek -- I had to bomb out after trying for a couple weeks to configure Samba and get help from a very good geek friend -- but I'm interested in learning enough to be able to tweak the system and applications to my needs and preferences.

I'll get back to you later with as many specifics as I can get.

For now, thanks again,

LOts for me to check out in your

[Eric Weir]

Re: Thunderbird very slow

I had a similar problem - only with thunderbird when trying to access an SMTP connection on port 465, and migrated to Claws-Mail:

Not a solution to your problem, but you may like the Claws-Mail MTA instead

I might. I checked it out, i.e., the web-site. I'm unclear whether compiling is necessary. I'm new enough to K/Ubuntu/Linux, and not enough of a geek -- not a geek at all -- to not be up for that, yet.

I'll definitely keep it in mind.

Thanks,

[claydoh]

Re: Thunderbird very slow

One thing to try is to try a fresh thunderbird config setup. The easiest way to try this is to simply rename your /home/<your-username>/.mozilla-thunderbird to say, mozilla-thunderbird-old. Note this directory is hidden Fire up thunderbird, and see if the fresh new clean config makes any difference for you. If it does, you can recreate your email account settings (I see no visible way to export/backup the settings) and then go to your renamed folder, and look for a directory called "Mail" in there somewhere, and copy it over to the same place in the new .mozilla folder. The topmost folder will most likely be different between between the two folders, but that is ok. one will look similar to this:
f9sldp0l.default, and the other will have some different characters, xxxxxxxx.default.

I don't have much t-bird experience as I mainly run that off a usb stick for when I am in windows at work. It is a touch slow, but that is probably due to the system i run it on has minimal ram and is running off the usb thumb drive

As you are used to running t-bird in windows, trying to preserve your cross-platform usage is probably easier than trying a whole new email client. I personally love Kmail, though I always try out thunderbird/evolution regularly just in case they are better . I always end up going back to Kmail.