If I've kept Thunderbird open for several days, things start to get slow. (Mac 10.11)
I've been using Thunderbird on Macs since it was released, so I think I know quite a bit about it. I use it for both POP and IMAP, on several accounts. But one problem continues as an annoyance. If I've kept Thunderbird open for several days, things start to get slow. When I click on an e-mail, it can take many seconds to highlight it. If I want to drag an e-mail to a folder, it can take many seconds to grab it, and let me do it. When I kill TB and restart, the problems ALL go away. For a while. So when I'm getting exasperated about pokiness, I just kill TB and restart. Presto. Everything is fine.
But there must be some reason for these delays, and some reason that a restart fixes them. Help?
Modificato da Wayne Mery il
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Can you share a bit more about your setup?
- How much RAM do you have and what kind of hard disk (SSD or not)?
- Which exact version of Thunderbird do you have?
- How many emails and folders (roughly)?
So many factors can affect Thunderbird performance it's difficult to help anyone with such problems without a careful step-by-step approach. If you have some time, I'd suggest going through suggestions in this article.
If your computer supports it, you may consider upgrading to macOS High Sierra (10.13), it uses APFS which is apparently optimized for SSDs and may provide better I/O performance.
iMac OS10.11.6 9GB RAM Thunderbird 52.7.0 (latest)
About 25 folders, and a total of maybe five hundred e-mails. Rather few of those stay in any Inbox. Of course, this latter doesn't change when I restart Thunderbird, so it's hard to understand that this info has anything to do with it. The Thunderbird folder has 600MB, but it's been doing this since when that folder was a lot smaller.
I see no reason to update an OS because one application acts pokey after a couple of days, and fixes itself on restart. Is this a recognized issue that OS upgrading fixes? Does everyone with 10.11 see this pokiness? If not, let's skip that.
I've reviewed the Common Problems page, and none seems relevant.
Your system has plenty of RAM and the amount of email you carry is tiny, at least very small to be blamed for the performance.
Performance issues are often caused by other software interference (mostly anti-virus). If you already applied all suggestions mentioned in that article, I am afraid I don't have an answer.
No anti-virus programs are installed and or active.
The real kicker is that a restart fixes everything. So it would seem to be something that is getting bogged down in Thunderbird itself.
> The real kicker is that a restart fixes everything. So it would seem to be something that is getting bogged down in Thunderbird itself.
Behavior changing over time could be "Thunderbird itself" or it could be Mac related. But I think it is more typically the former.
So how much memory is Thunderbird using after a few minutes of using it? And how much is it using when you find it to be slow?
And do you operate with folders in unified view, or "All"? (View > Folders)
View -> Folders = All always.
Not completely sure how to establish how much memory TB is using. Maybe 10% of CPU in Activity Monitor.
As I said, of order 10% in the Activity Monitor. Really surprised that no one else sees these delays.
danll said
As I said, of order 10% in the Activity Monitor. Really surprised that no one else sees these delays.
Whether they do or don't doesn't really help in this case. Still need to establish how much memory TB is using
Are the instructions at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201538 helpful?