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Problems
- Most performance problems are due to not compacting
the Inbox folder often enough. Deleted messages aren't physically
deleted until the folder is compacted; they are merely hidden from view
and marked for deletion. This means, for example, that Thunderbird might
be loading a 100MB folder index when it displays a Inbox folder with
just a few messages. (Compact is automatic starting in version 5) Vlick for more
- Thunderbird appears to parse the contents of the entire Inbox folder when it fetches and stores new mail for POP accounts. If the folder contains messages with certain missing headers (typically due to spam or a corrupted folder) it can get caught in a loop. The workaround (after first backing up your profile folder!) would be to move all of the Inbox folders messages to another folder (where you can identify and delete the troublesome messages later on) and compact the Inbox. In the worst case you might need to copy the messages in your Inbox to another folder, exit Thunderbird, back up your profile, delete both the "Inbox." and "Inbox.msf" files for that account in your profile and then run Thunderbird again. It will create a new empty Inbox folder if you do that.
- See if its due to an add-on by temporarily disabling all add-ons using "Help -> Restart with Add-ons Disabled". The Test Pilot add-on for example currently has a bug that causes performance problems. [1]. The Lightning add-on can also slow performance. The Ubuntu Unity integration addon seems to drasticly slow downloading large attachments. [2]
- You might need to defragment the disk drive.
- Check that you have enough free physical memory so that applications aren't being slowed down by constantly being moved to/from the swap file. You can decrease swapping by reducing the number of running applications, and programs in your system tray. It might also help to set the minimum and maximum size of the swap file to the same value.
- Thunderbird uses an "xul.mfl" file in the profile to cache some of the data for the user interface. This normally increases performance, but sometimes it can get corrupted/bloated, and make things worse. The workaround is to exit Thunderbird and delete that file. Thunderbird will create a new one the next time you run it.
- If you're using Gmail with an IMAP account remove the All Mail folder from the list of synchronized folders, unsubscribe it, exit, and then delete both "All Mail." and "All Mail.msf". The All Mail folder doubles the amount of disk space used by your Gmail account and may cause some problems.
- Thunderbird loads a folder's *.msf file into memory whenever it opens the folder. By default it keeps up to 30 *.msf files open for 5 minutes (and their contents in memory), unless they are "special" folders, which it never closes. It loads the inbox.msf file for every account on startup. The best way to minimize the amount of memory used is to archive messages you have already read or otherwise no longer need in Inbox into folders that you rarely open. Moving a message to an archive folder opens it, so consider archiving messages by by year and month rather than yearly so that the archive being used doesn't get excessively large. [3]
