mozilla (very) slow and excessive RAM usage on high retention newsservers
greetings to the forum. TB 115.7.0 (64 bit) on windows 10, 32 GB RAM, intel i7-6700 CPU@3.40GHz I signed up for an account on the newsserver astraweb.com which has a very high message retention, around 21 years in the groups I subscribed to!!! in two groups I subscribed to, it downloaded 1410000 and 3031000 headers (no messages)... since after this massive download it was slow and unresponsive often, I repaired the folders of those groups and deleted the startup cache... in response the TB re-downloaded everything again, remained not responding for about 20 minutes and during this process used over 20 GB of RAM memory (see attached image). now it's using about 8.5 GB RAM, but every time I click on one group or another of astraweb it freezes with a "not responding" message until some mysterious task finishes... I could try to limit the number of headers downloaded in the account settings but I will only do it if I have to... If I don't find some solution, this way TB is almost unusable...
before posting on bugzilla and before deleting the older headers, do you think there is anything else I can do to avoid freezing TB on that server?
All Replies (8)
Try right clicking the newsgroup in the folder list and in properties see if the include in the global index option is selected. I no longer have access to nntp servers once Mozilla decided it was something they did not want to support these days. But I almost brought Thunderbird to it's knees with the global search and indexer indexing huge lists of things on RSS feeds.
Matt said
Try right clicking the newsgroup in the folder list and in properties see if the include in the global index option is selected.
hello, in the folder properties for newsgroups there is no "include in the global index" checkbox, only in email folders...
Anyway, the problem seems to have disappeared... after a couple of days of massive use of the RAM and slowness of the TB with no response stucks, now the RAM occupies around 700-800 MB and the execution speed is normal...
the fact remains that on that server I DO NOT use the automatic download of new headers, only manual, so I will not indicate the problem as solved...maybe I will update it if I notice further slowdowns...
Izmjenjeno
> I could try to limit the number of headers downloaded in the account settings
For 21 years of messages...it would be advisable.
FWIW, I use blueworldhosting. It's free. snews://news.blueworldhosting.com.:563/alt.comp.software.thunderbird
Wayne Mery said
FWIW, I use blueworldhosting. It's free. snews://news.blueworldhosting.com.:563/alt.comp.software.thunderbird
thanks for the report, I forwarded it to my newsgroup colleagues in a panic because from today Google is ending support for newsgroups...
Wayne Mery said
> I could try to limit the number of headers downloaded in the account settings For 21 years of messages...it would be advisable.
mumble mumble...so in your opinion is it more or less normal for a newsreader to consume 20 GB RAM and freeze with a "no response" message while only downloading headers? it can be one year or 50 years of retention, IMHO the newsreader should download headers/messages in the background and possibly with a progress bar or popup that informs the user what the software is doing... I see you are Moderator and Top 10 Contributor, if even advanced users think this way I can do without posting a new bug on bugzilla and save time and effort, what do you say?
Hello there
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/file-bug-report-or-feature-request-mozilla
Greetings Firefox volunteer
> I see you are Moderator and Top 10 Contributor, if even advanced users think this way I can do without posting a new bug on bugzilla and save time and effort, what do you say?
The cynicism is not lost on me.
I wasn't commenting on the initial 20gb.
Because I know every well the bug reports and how the news code works, and as someone who has been using news+Thunderbird for close to 20 years, I was suggesting that if you want even less resource usage on an ongoing basis, that reducing the article retention is the way to go.