S
Silver Slimer
Holy shit. It freezes on THAT kind of a configuration? Jesus Christ it's
worse than awful isn't it?
Holy shit. It freezes on THAT kind of a configuration? Jesus Christ it's
worse than awful isn't it?
A
Adam Kubias
It only freezes for video and graphics heavy rss feeds. Rarely on
anything else.
A
Adam Kubias
Just posting this message takes 138 MB RAM. It's kind of a resource hog.
S
Silver Slimer
I absolutely want to remove Thunderbird and replace it but I have no
idea what newsreader to use instead. Thunderbird is so fully-featured
that it's hard to move away from it. If WLM quoted properly on Usenet,
I'd be sold but it doesn't.
A
Adam Kubias
I probably won't switch it up either. Overall losing a couple of minutes
a day (not really losing since I instantly switch activities) is not all
that big of a deal.
D
Daave
G
Good Guy
Perhaps old WLM !!!!!!!!!
I am still using TB but I rarely update it.
P
Paul
Adam said:
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.
Paul
M
Mike Barnes
Silver said:
I have a rather most modest PC (i7-2600S @ 2.8GHz, 4GB) and TB has never
frozen on me. I have no complaints about speed.
Incidentally don't you just love the way Microsoft's informational
displays fail to provide any way of copying their text to the clipboard?
B
BillW50
Char Jackson said:
It isn't rocket science. All you have to do and open up the Task Manager
and see what all of the processes are doing with the CPU. I also run
Process Lasso and it logs processes, which ones that hogs the processor.
And both Thunderbird and Firefox are usually the only ones in the log
for days.
B
BillW50
Daave said:
I've heard of it before, but I never tried it. But I am a big user of
OE-QuoteFix for OE6. I just played with it and it appears it only adds
another layer of quoting on the replied to post and inserts a sig.
Apparently it is for WLM versions, which doesn't add quoting at all. But
doesn't seem to be any benefit for versions like WLM 2009.
J
Juan Wei
Adam Kubias has written on 2/18/2014 6:10 PM:
Would you explain that please? Do RSS feeds actually deliver video
content to you and you can view it in Thunderbird?
Would you explain that please? Do RSS feeds actually deliver video
content to you and you can view it in Thunderbird?
J
Juan Wei
Paul has written on 2/19/2014 12:43 AM:
How about using Compact Folders?
How about using Compact Folders?
K
Ken Blake
Try Forte Agent, which I like a lot. It comes with a 30-day free
trial, so you don't have to pay for it ($29) until you decide whether
or not you like it.
K
Keith Nuttle
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.
Y
Yousuf Khan
I have a similar problem with Tbird. It will sometimes just freeze for
about 10 seconds while I'm in the middle of writing a message, like this
one. I have desktop gadgets that show me disk and processor activity,
and initially I thought maybe it's accessing the disk for some reason,
but it's doesn't seem to be disk activity at all. Instead, I see
processor activity just spike on one core for the duration of time that
the freeze occurs. I got six-cores, so why doesn't Tbird know how to
distribute itself better over the multiple cores? I also notice the
Tbird's memory utilization just keeps growing and growing the longer you
keep it open. I had 8 GB's previously, and I saw once it had used up 6
of the 8GB, just by itself. I have now upgraded to 16GB, but the memory
utilization is still heavy. It didn't matter if I ran the thing on an
SSD or a regular HDD, the freezes still happened. Running newsgroups has
made the Tbird profile absolutely directory massive, with lots (100's of
thousands) of big and little files. I think Tbird is more unstable when
running newsgroups than when not, the developers seem to have little to
no interest in fixing newsgroup support in Tbird.
Win 7 Ult x86
PC = AMD Phenom II X6 1100T, 16GB DDR3. Lot's of space on the drive
that's its on.
Yousuf Khan
P
Paul
Keith said:
The Configuration Editor concept is just unfamiliar to Windows
users. The concepts come from Unix and XWindows. Where naming
of options has been that way for some time. The Configuration
Editor is similar to a text editor applied to an XRDB (X Resouce
DataBase).
It's the Registry, in disguise. Ordinary users don't want to use
the Registry, but this program happens to have its own private
registry. And all because nobody wanted to make an Options
or Preferences panel to fit (the "GUI way").
In Unix land, we used to use commercial software which came with
no documentation. We would open executable files in a text editor,
and search for text strings of the kind you see in the Configuration
Editor. This allowed changing settings we would not have been otherwise
able to change. Some tools had hundreds of those things. It was a game
at work, something to discuss over coffee break, what new and marvelous
things you'd found in the commercial software.
Tools like Thunderbird and Firefox, are cross-platform. But at
heart, they had to start somewhere. They were either Windows-centric
or Unix/Linux-centric. If you download the tarball for the program
(the source), all the text files have Unix line terminations. That
should give you a better idea what the origins of the development
might have been. I don't know the actual origins (where they were
standing when 1.0.0 came out), but I can guess at it.
These programs "wouldn't suck so bad", if they only ran on
the one platform
Paul
B
BillW50
Char Jackson said:
Actually I believe cause and effect is enough reason to dump it without
finding out the real cause. Like the old joke "Doc, it hurts when I do
this!" And I haven't really investigated what Thunderbird is actually
doing to freeze up suddenly in my case. My latest theory is it might be
indexing my IMAP accounts. And it is most annoying while I am composing
a message. As it stops showing keystrokes and when it unfreezes some of
the last keystrokes can be totally lost (probably because the keyboard
buffer overflowed).
My temporary fix is to copy and paste to another editor. And it doesn't
matter what other editor, Notepad, WordPad, WordStar, Word, etc. and the
rest shows every keystroke and never drops characters. Regardless
whether Thunderbird is currently frozen or not. It only happens under
Thunderbird and nothing else. So the solution seems pretty clear to me.
Don't use Thunderbird or at least use another editor and the major
problem is gone.
P
Paul
Yousuf said:
Just for the record, Thunderbird has a complete HTML engine inside.
All you need, to break it, is get it "eating" some bad HTML/JavaScript.
Try sending someone an HTML email, attach an actively leaking JavaScript
attachment, and watch the fun.
It's a good thing that certain NSPs have installed CleanFeed to
filter out various kinds of attacks of that sort. It's the only
reason Thunderbird isn't a bigger liability as a USENET client.
The "guy who runs the server" is protecting us
Thunderbird has a huge attack surface, but I guess that's why people
use it. Lots of the things we use every day are like that.
I had my very first "memory blowout" just yesterday here. Firefox
managed to leak up to the 2GB mark. And when I opened one of the
web pages, the page would not render (repaint), because the
program had run out of RAM, but was too ashamed of itself to crash.
It took maybe five or ten minutes, before it had the good sense
to crash, and send a report to Mozilla.
That can be blamed on one of the web pages I had opened
at the time. Presumably, more leaky code on a web page.
Firefox is fine today, and works as if nothing had
happened.
Paul
A
Adam Kubias
Yes, for example I have an NHL rss feed
"http://www.nhl.com/rss/news.xml". The preview for a message will state
"SOCHI -- Phil Kessel has carried his red-hot play from the NHL season
into the 2014 Sochi Olympics to help the United States prove its status
as a gold-medal contender. With seven points in three games, the Toronto
Maple Leafs right wing not only ..." If I double-click, a new tab with
the full message - basically the same view you get from their website
opens with video content.
I have 20 feeds coming in.