A Pointed Critique of Thunderbird 3's Performance Compared to v.2 234
PerfProtector writes "Did you recently install Thunderbird 3 or upgrade from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3? Did you notice any severe slowdown in your machine or a major decrease in its performance? Well, many people around the world encountered these problems. We wrote a technical analysis about the severe problems that are caused by Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client. These problems include anomalous usage of CPU, memory, hard disk and Internet bandwidth. You can read the full analysis, including several graphs that show how bad the situation is and what went wrong from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3. For example, while CPU utilization of Thunderbird 2 is usually between 0% to 10%, with an average of 0.3%, Thunderbird 3 CPU utilization is between 5% to 80%, with an average of 30% — 100 times more than Thunderbird 2. In addition, during long periods of time, Thunderbird 3 used more than 50% of the overall CPU resources.This behavior slows dramatically the whole machine." It's worth noting that this analysis comes from developers who have developed a (freeware) tool they claim will improve Thunderbird's performance, but they explain also how to do so with manual changes.
New features consume resources, news at 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, storing and providing full text search over a large pile of email consumes resources ... duuuh?
Also they're measuring the performance of Thunderbird while converting to the new system, not in its steady state. This is like complaining that Firefox uses a lot more CPU importing settings from IE than IE uses when looking at your home page.
Their claim as to how long it took to do the full text indexing of the mail seems dubious to me. I've got a similar amount of mail, and the time it took to index was more like minutes, not days.
Closed, Won't Fix (Score:1, Insightful)
Almost every message above this one (that I have read at this time) is a prime example of what people hate about nerds (and by extension much of OSS forums/support).
They built MF'ing graphs and detailed analyses of the issue. It is obvious that *something* is seriously broken.
From the comments it is apparent that few clicked through to the article ( "I can't reproduce it, sucks to be you" or "stupid n00b ought to know better" or "Thunderbird? Meh.") and those that may have just decided "too long, did not read".
It is goddamned Digg.com with a different color scheme.
If a conversation of the issue is to be found... it will be buried under a mountain of hubris.
Re:Who still uses a local email client? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know that you can set up these email clients to work with your web email, right?
That's why they're called email clients and not email servers. Thunderbird can access your hotmail, gmail, and exchange account. Makes it easier than having to log in to each item.
Re:Who still uses a local email client? (Score:3, Insightful)
If your ISP changes, does your email address remain the same just because you use webmail? Didn't think so.
If your ISP changes, and you use *their* webmail, how do you access your old emails?
I have emails going back 10+ years, stored in my local Thunderbird archives, and I've changed email addresses & ISP's more times than I care to remember.
Re:Did I notice a severe slowdown? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply take a look at their forums to get a good sampling.
Whatever you get from the forums will not be a "good sampling". Users for whom Thunderbird works normally (which I presume to be the majority) will not be posting on the forums.
Re:Did I notice a severe slowdown? (Score:3, Insightful)
MozStorage/Gloda is new in TB 3.0, and uses sqlite (Score:4, Insightful)
So the question is, are they still using Mork concurrently? Why are MSF files being updated?
Re:Summary Fail (Score:2, Insightful)
Stagnation doesn't just mean no new features, it can also mean no new bug-fixes.
Re:Did I notice a severe slowdown? (Score:2, Insightful)