Thunderbird, wtf are you doing where you need 83% CPU plus ~50GB (virt) and 20G (res) of RAM allocated?

The entire mailbox isn’t even 1GB in total size. Yet here it is, cranking out all of this nebulous processing 24/7… literally 24/7 it’s running loads like this for months now. Generally I ignore it because the workstation has a modern EPYC with 32 cores and 128GB of RAM, so it’s not completely crippling my usage… but sometimes it does, and sometimes I want that 50/20GB split to not be around, and I want those clock cycles and L1/L2 cache doing something useful.

This issue has persisted over several major versions, it’s not a new issue. I’ve gone through all of the usual steps, removing all themes and plugins, etc. Nothing fixes the problem, and there’s nothing useful in its logs. Uninstall and reinstall, use on different computers, use with different server settings, use on different domain accounts, it doesn’t matter… Thunderbird always runs itself into failure mode eventually.

I don’t want to dtrace it, I don’t want to strace it, I don’t want to deal with this at all because email is not complicated enough to warrant such investment of my engineering time or focus.

I hate what Thunderbird has become, and I’ve been using it since version 1.0 way back in the 2000s. I’ve used it on all of the operating systems upon which it’s been supported. This has become absurd, the slow death of a once great product.

You’re an email client. You handle IMAP. This resource usage is unacceptable.

#opensource #mozilla #thunderbird #email #slow #debugging #programming #linux #freebsd #desktop