thunderbird slow over fibre checkpoint router
We've been using Thunderbird on multiple desktops and laptops for many years. Our service provider is GSuite. Few months back we have replaced the ADSL old infrastructure (asynced 100/3) with a brand new fiber optic cable (syned 10/10) and a new CheckPoint 750 router. Beforehand this change, everything worked smoothly.
Right after we've installed the new connection the performance of Thunderbird dropped (slow in receiving emails, very slow when trying to open new folders and when trying to copy an email from one account to another). Since we have laptops we can compare performance also outside of the office network, and I can report that outside of the network, these problems disappear. Following this we also replaced the office internal switches (twice) to brand new ones. This didn't help as well.
Our service provider is managing the router and is aware of the problem, but they haven't found any problem. We did try to give higher priority to all relevant ports to boost the email traffic, but it didn't help as well.
In Thunderbird we have tried all the 'performance hints' available online. Didn't help as well.
There is one thing that I've noticed, which so far is not explained, and I don't know if it is relevant - in many cases, while at the office network, when we try to have any 'heavy' operation (like creating a new folder or copying an email from one account to the other), there is an error message from Thunderbird about authentication failure. When I looked up for the source of this error, I found out that G Suite sometimes invoke this error and the solution is to use the OAuth2. The thing is that we are already using this protocol... and still we get this error...
Anyone suffered from such problem? Any ideas how to solve this beside rolling back to the old infrastructure?
Thanks.
All Replies (6)
Since you've demonstrated that TB works fine on other networks, I wonder if there's a network setting in TB that's incompatible with the new network - nothing to do with gsuite or OAuth. Another user recently had a somewhat similar issue that was resolved by disabling IPv6 in TB.
ybzybz1,
What did you determined to be the cause of your issue?
Wayne Mery said
ybzybz1, What did you determined to be the cause of your issue?
I didn't. Nothing helped so far, although I've tried any of the suggestions. The issue is still here.
The thing is that this issue comes and goes, in a sporadic manner, with no correlation to the number of concurrent users in the LAN.
Recently we have also updated the Thunderbird to the new version (68). It didn't help as well.
This is really frustrating. We are in the process of looking for alternative to Thunderbird due to that.
I resolved some mysterious dropping off to sleep that was occurring on all internet things by enabling HTTPS DNS resolution. I assume my ISP has some sort of latent DNS issues, of the government logging is slowing things to a crawl at times.
The article here describes enabling it in Firefox. You can do the same in Thunderbird using the config editor
IPv6 being disabled is again a response to DNS issues, but in this case many providers have not got all the quirks out of their IPV6 configurations. My observation here is that disabling IPV6 appears to work for certain US based providers.
Does you new system come with any sort of edge device that scans mail those have been known to put everything in slow motion at time. particularly when the device is really to small for the load.
Hi Matt, Thanks. I will try this. We have already disabled all mail scanning layers (there were few). The problem is not there. Yoram
Perhaps try some of the mail tasks from a command line interaction with the server using telnet. That might help identify if it is Thunderbird or something else
https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204404584/sending-or-viewing-emails-using-telnet
It might also be worth logging the IMAP connection if it is slow IMAP to see exactly what is occurring at a low level. These logs get huge fast, so don't leave them running all day of the file IO to the log will become the limiting factor. https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging
At an even more technical level you might need to look at what is on the wire using something like wireshark. https://www.wireshark.org/ (These files make Thunderbird logging look tiny.) But if DNS requests are going out and only coming back ages latter that will only really become apparent in something like wireshark.