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Large amounts of CPU and is very slow, after waking computer from sleep. Also slow deleting messages. SOLVED caused by huge trash folder (Nx10k messages)

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Lately, when first waking my computer from sleep, Thunderbird is extremely slow for almost every operation - folders scroll jerkily and only after a while, deleting a message takes a long time, selecting a mail there is a long delay before the mail message displays. It is nearly unusable. I have been deleting the current instance and starting a new one, which seems to help, but it can be multiple minutes before the first process terminates. Sometimes, this also happens during the day. I have noticed the last couple of days running the task manager, that when this is going on Thunderbird is using up something like 12% of the CPU, whereas the rest of the time it is a fraction of a percent, at most. While I have had occasional slowness prior to this, the last few days have been dramatic both in the degree of impact and the consistency of occurring coming out of sleep. I am running 52.9.1

Lately, when first waking my computer from sleep, Thunderbird is extremely slow for almost every operation - folders scroll jerkily and only after a while, deleting a message takes a long time, selecting a mail there is a long delay before the mail message displays. It is nearly unusable. I have been deleting the current instance and starting a new one, which seems to help, but it can be multiple minutes before the first process terminates. Sometimes, this also happens during the day. I have noticed the last couple of days running the task manager, that when this is going on Thunderbird is using up something like 12% of the CPU, whereas the rest of the time it is a fraction of a percent, at most. While I have had occasional slowness prior to this, the last few days have been dramatic both in the degree of impact and the consistency of occurring coming out of sleep. I am running 52.9.1

Ilungisiwe ngu Wayne Mery

Isisombulu esikhethiweyo

Good to know. And I can confirm that large junk and large Trash folders on the order of what you have stated are known to cause performance issues. You will want to keep Trash and Junk folders small - preferably emptied periodically.

And it would not surprise me if you antivirus is also causing issues.

"A" is your archive key https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/archived-messages

Funda le mpendulo kwimeko leyo 👍 0

All Replies (6)

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You are totally doing this the hard way.

right+click trash folder, pick empty right+click junk folder, pick empty

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I actually move stuff from Trash to archive folders, eliminating the spam before I do so. I have now completed this very belated maintenance and we will see what happens.

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tamhas said

I actually move stuff from Trash to archive folders, eliminating the spam before I do so. I have now completed this very belated maintenance and we will see what happens.

That's a high cost process compared to archiving a message directly to its ultimate destination folder, so that trash only has trash. But you're also not the only person to do use this process.

That said 1. the delete process will be much faster if you do shift+delete for messages that you know you really don't want. Then the messages do not go to trash folder, and there is less cleanup later. 2. if you do not totally empty trash or junk folder, you will want to compact those folders

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I do a fair amount of filtering into appropriate destination folders on the inbound side, but currently just have one folder per year on the archive side. So, if I had a key that would send to the current archive folder, that would be ducky. This current approach actually works fairly painlessly, *if* I do it at least once a year ... but this time I had something like 100,000 messages in Trash.

I didn't know about the shift delete ... I'll try to remember that for cleaning up Junk going forward.

So far no super high CPUs since the cleanup.

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Isisombululo esiKhethiweyo

Good to know. And I can confirm that large junk and large Trash folders on the order of what you have stated are known to cause performance issues. You will want to keep Trash and Junk folders small - preferably emptied periodically.

And it would not surprise me if you antivirus is also causing issues.

"A" is your archive key https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/archived-messages

Ilungisiwe ngu Wayne Mery

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We appear to have found the problem. No wakeup spikes this morning and performance overall is just fine.

Thanks for your help! And tips!

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