1. How much memory is thunderbird.exe using when it is slow? 2. Unsubscribe the "All Mail" folders in the gmail accounts 3. Do you need the calendar addon? If not, disable it. 4. Is your thunderbird profile data on networked disk?

1. When it slows/hangs/goes "Thunderbird not responding" it is using around 850mb-999mb of ram

2. I did unsubscibe from "all mail" folder

3. Calendar add in was never configured. Now its disabled

4. Profile data is on local disk

I recommend you to store data in Sub Folders.

I have been doing that for years and did the same for another person that instead of POP was using IMAP.

This way each index gets smaller. I have thousands? millions? of e-mails and no worries. But for every folder that holds many e-mails I do move them to year, half-year, monthly subfolders because time ago it did not supported files above 4GB.

This way you keep all of them in TB and are searchable. For other people that did not needed the older e-mails "live" I've just moved the unused older folder to a "Thunderbird_Offline" folder outside the Profile Folder and if for any reason they needed them back I could just go ahead and move/copy them back.

I have 16.6 GB of mixed e-mails (text only and big attachments) correctly sorted, and works OK.

iamapowerslave makes some excellent recommendations.

Do you filter incoming messages to folders? Have a big Inbox, Junk/Spam or Trash? Are many of the incoming messages server logs?

And why running on a server OS?

I do have a large mailbox, but do use a lot of subfolders. I have unsubscribed to many of them and gone in to tools- acct settings -> sync/storage/-> keep msgs for this acct on local drive and unchecked it. Under advanced, I checkbox just a few folders in each account for "download"

My inbox sizes are 276mb (gmail), 314mb (gmail), 1728mb (pobox, and 39kb (outlook 365) There are other folders getting a fair amount of incoming mail, but Im not syncing/subscribing to those - just open them as needed.

All my mail filters/tags are done in gmail before hitting thunderbird. No filters at all defined in tbird.

52.4.0 on Windows 2016 server 64 bit in safe mode with all extensions disabled.

I click menu bar items and it takes 2 seconds for the menu to drop down. I get random 3-7 second dramatic pauses in the compose email window.

This is a fresh install of tbird from only about a month ago. I dont see this behavior on windows 2012R2 server 64-bit.

I've looked at the Windows system event logs - nothing there. The other windows / programs respond just fine when thunderbird is having a grand-mal seizure.

Sometime i notice in the activity window a green-sync circle activity happening that has the label "null" on it.

Im an experienced thunderbird user for the past 15 years on every platform, but this is the least usable ive ever seen it. Did someone from the Outlook team commit to the codebase recently?  ;)

Is there a debug dump I can generate ? Has tbird been tested on 2016 server? (need it for use via remote desktop on a restricted subnet) How else can I help sort this out?

Why running on a server OS? Is it bare hardware, or a VM? What type of hardware? Are other users or services running on the instance?

I need to use thunderbird on window 2016 server because my daily driver is a box i access via remote desktop on a restricted subnet

The server is dedicated hardware. Dell R420, windows 2016 datacenter, 2x 2.4Ghz CPU, 96G Ram. Should be enough to run a productivity app :)

Nothing much else running on the box. Thunderbird and Chrome are the biggest users of cpu and ram.

You mention a restricted subnet, yet seem to be unaware of whitelisting IPs/hostnames ( i.e. imap.mailbox.foo,smtp.mailbox.foo) and or $Mail_App. How restrictive is this network?

its only restricted inbound. Outbound is full internet access. Not the problem but thanks for the thought. Thunderbird is also functional, just slow at times. Restarting in safe mode has helped a little, but still has pauses.

 Application Basics

   Name: Thunderbird
   Version: 52.4.0
   User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.4.0
   Profile Folder: Open Folder

             (Local drive)
   Application Build ID: 20171004092449
   Enabled Plugins: about:plugins
   Build Configuration: about:buildconfig
   Memory Use: about:memory
   Profiles: about:profiles

 Mail and News Accounts
   account1:
     INCOMING: account1, , (imap) imap.gmail.com:993, SSL, OAuth2
     OUTGOING: , smtp.gmail.com:465, SSL, OAuth2, true

   account2:
     INCOMING: account2, , (none) Local Folders, plain, passwordCleartext

   account3:
     INCOMING: account3, , (imap) imap.gmail.com:993, SSL, OAuth2
     OUTGOING: , smtp.gmail.com:465, SSL, OAuth2, true

   account4:
     INCOMING: account4, , (imap) mail.pobox.com:993, SSL, passwordCleartext
     OUTGOING: , smtp.pobox.com:465, SSL, passwordCleartext, true

   account5:
     INCOMING: account5, , (imap) outlook.office365.com:993, SSL, passwordCleartext
     OUTGOING: , smtp.office365.com:587, alwaysSTARTTLS, passwordCleartext, true

 Crash Reports

 Extensions
   Lightning, 5.4.4, false, {e2fda1a4-762b-4020-b5ad-a41df1933103}

 Important Modified Preferences

   Name: Value

     browser.cache.disk.capacity: 358400
     browser.cache.disk.filesystem_reported: 1
     browser.cache.disk.smart_size_cached_value: 358400
     browser.cache.disk.smart_size.first_run: false
     browser.cache.disk.smart_size.use_old_max: false
     dom.apps.reset-permissions: true
     extensions.lastAppVersion: 52.4.0
     font.internaluseonly.changed: false
     font.name.monospace.el: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-cyrillic: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-unicode: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-western: Consolas
     font.name.sans-serif.el: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-cyrillic: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-unicode: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-western: Calibri
     font.name.serif.el: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-cyrillic: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-unicode: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-western: Cambria
     font.size.fixed.el: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-cyrillic: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-unicode: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-western: 14
     font.size.variable.el: 17
     font.size.variable.x-cyrillic: 17
     font.size.variable.x-unicode: 17
     font.size.variable.x-western: 17
     mail.openMessageBehavior.version: 1
     mailnews.database.global.datastore.id: 6599d161-f163-4f91-ae41-bd689862dd3
     mailnews.database.global.views.conversation.columns: {"threadCol":{"visible":true,"ordinal":"1"},"flaggedCol":{"visible":true,"ordinal":"3"},"attachmentCol":{"visible":false…
     media.gmp.storage.version.observed: 1
     network.cookie.prefsMigrated: true
     network.predictor.cleaned-up: true
     places.database.lastMaintenance: 1508271819
     places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages: 122334
     plugin.importedState: true
     security.sandbox.content.tempDirSuffix: {d3a26023-7665-4912-8c80-0dd94dc53b32}

 Graphics

     GPU #1
     Description: RDPUDD Chained DD
     Vendor ID: 0x0000
     Device ID: 0x0000
     RAM: Unknown
     Drivers: RDPUDD

     Features
     Direct2D: Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.
     DirectWrite: true (10.0.14393.1358)
     WebGL Renderer: Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.

     AzureCanvasBackend: skia
     AzureCanvasAccelerated: 0
     AzureFallbackCanvasBackend: cairo
     AzureContentBackend: skia

 JavaScript

 Incremental GC: 1

 Accessibility

   Activated: 0
   Prevent Accessibility: 0

 Library Versions

     Expected minimum version
     Version in use

     NSPR
     4.13.1
     4.13.1

     NSS
     3.28.6
     3.28.6

     NSS Util
     3.28.6
     3.28.6

     NSS SSL
     3.28.6
     3.28.6

     NSS S/MIME
     3.28.6
     3.28.6

Im also seeing this sometimes on one of my OAUTH accounts:

"the current operation on 'Inbox' did not success. The mail server for account mbw UW gmail responded: [TRYCREATE] no folder archives (failure)"

So you are using IMAP and some operations are taking too long.

Each time you click a folder, TB will try to connect to the IMAP server and refresh it. Since each folder contains thousands messages it must fetch changes from the server (I don't know if the protocol has means like a hash to quickly tell it that it is the same as it was the last time or how changes are done). I believe the issue is that it just can't handle all those messages.

What I used to do in a similar situation for another person with +300 emails a day and some with +20MB of attachments was to Move the messages to Local Folders in folders ordered by date ranges and keep those copies offline. If you want to keep everything in the cloud, move the messages to a "Folder" (in Gmail there are no folders) and DON'T Synchronize them in TB, like Archive for example.

To keep a local copy, first COPY all those e-mails to a local folder.

In fact maybe by just creating subfolders (in Gmail) you mail relieve TB from updating large folders and it'll be faster.

I cant move stuff to local folders, i need access from multiple machines to these imap boxes.

I've noticed when tbird is hanging sometimes, I see "Checking mail server capabilities (uw gmail)" along the bottom bar. Not sure if this is connected.

Switching between folders is also pretty slow, esp. when I choose the gmail/sent folder - that is a pretty big one. 8000 msgs, 419mb size. INbox is 5700 msgs 343mb.

Never had a problem on Windows 2012R2 server with this, but ive probably got settings pretty different now. sigh. Maybe I should verify 2012R2 server is working well still and then copy my profile over to 2016 server & see if it behaves same or worse.

Matt

What type and speed of disk drive? Anyone else logged on this windows server OS?

Still running better?