Seeing that this hasn't gotten a response.
Richard Owlett wrote:
I have been following recent thread on mozilla-support-thunderbird with
subject line "Thunderbird Extremely Slow and Pegging CPU". There have
been references to several Thunderbird specific articles on
kb.mozillazine.org . Mozillazine articles frequently are targeted at a
specific product but have an introductory sentence/paragraph indicating
they are applicable to other products in the Mozilla family. The
articles referenced do not have that sentence/paragraph. Is there any
*GROSS* difference between Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Mail/News?
Not as far as I'm aware.
I'm an antique using SeaMonkey 2.26.1 under WinXP Pro SP3.
I have only POP email.
.../[profileid].slt/Mail occupies 2.5 GB with 417 files in 66 folders
.../[profileid].slt/Mail/[primary email acct] occupies 136 files in 15
folders
.../[profileid].slt/News occupies 140 MB with 162 files in 8 folders
I retain full text of all email.
I retain only headers for news.
Nothing remarkable there.
I tend to:
1. take a coffee break when launching SeaMonkey.
2. hibernate my computer rather than shutdown SeaMonkey.
3. notice that defragging makes SeaMonkey load faster.
I have ~20 active tags for emails and news articles.
I use read and flag status as modifiers to above.
I use a paid news server so archives may be more extensive than typical ;/
Functionality is *MORE* important than speed.
Comments &/or suggestions?
A couple of thoughts...
- If you're making extensive use of rules, that might have a little
effect, but possibly not dramatic.
- Unless you're using Windows XP, you shouldn't have do manual defrags
to get performance benefits. In Windows 6.x (Vista and later), default
configs have a scheduled defragging process that runs weekly. A
possible exception could be if you're running a nearly full hard drive
(usage more than 75% of capacity), or you've recently done a lot of
writing to the hard drive (e.g., writing a big batch of new files, or
deleting a lot of content -- both on the orders of several GB).
- I don't know that hibernate is likely to be doing anything, at least
not in ongoing usage. However, I know that on the occasions that I
hibernate my machines, reviving them seems to take noticeably longer
before everything is truly stable, than a full shutdown and restart. I
run TrueCrypt with full-drive encryption, and I don't know if that
contributes, or not. It's also worth noting that with Windows 8 and
later, in Microsoft's efforts to produce a faster booting experience,
the default handling for "shutdown" is actually "hibernate". You can
tweak those settings, so that Windows will offer "hibernate", where
you're expressly selecting hibernation, and "shutdown" is a true
shutdown, but it's not the default setting.
- One thing you should check is behavior with a separate profile,
although that's a little more complicated with a POP setup. One of the
things I do is to maintain a "bare metal" profile, with nearly all
default settings -- with that, if Seamonkey isn't behaving the way I
want it to, I can check to see if it's really a Seamonkey issue, or if
it's something that's specific to my profile. Most often, it's the
latter. However, I normally use that for the browser, and I don't
configure mail into that profile.
If you want to check mail/news, you could configure your accounts into a
test profile, where you either do IMAP, or you set POP accounts to leave
mail on the server, although that won't do anything for your rules handling.
Several months ago, I did a rebuild of my primary profile. The one that
I was working from was *really* old, possibly dating back through the
old Mozilla suite to a Netscape 4 installation. There was a lot of
accumulated crud in the profile, including a lot of junk in prefs.js
(old printer definitions, stuff left over from extensions that were
tried and discarded, etc.), as well as inconsistencies of email
accounts, where I changed addresses and/or server names on existing mail
accounts, rather than doing the proper thing and creating new accounts.
Although the effect wasn't dramatic, I found a little speed, and
noticeably better stability on a fresh profile.
- I've found that occasionally, performance in Mozilla products
(Seamonkey, Firefox and Thunderbird) may be improved by turning off
hardware acceleration for your display. That's one of those things that
is typically specific to the hardware bundle that you're running.
- On my primary profile, I have multiple email accounts (mostly POP) and
multiple news accounts. Something that I discovered a long time ago was
that I was a little too aggressive on scheduling checks for updated
content. One of the things that I did was to lower the frequency of
checking, and also adjust schedules, so that I wasn't checking servers
simultaneously, at least most of the time. In particular, with news
servers, I set one server to check hourly, a second server to check on a
55 minute rotation, and a third server to check on a 65 minute rotation.
My mail accounts are handled in a similar way, even if the check
rotation is much shorter. Unless I leave Seamonkey open for several
days at a time (and I only do that occasionally), it's rare that I have
update checks for more than one server running at any specific time.
- For your specific symptoms, you may actually be having a hardware
problem, possibly an issue with your hard drive. If you spend most of
your time in Seamonkey (and comparatively small amounts of time in other
applications, especially if Seamonkey isn't active), then it's easy to
assume that Seamonkey is the problem, without seeing effect on other
applications.
Over the past several years, I've seen a handful of computers that are
are noticeably slow, with no immediately obvious reason -- no problems
with not enough RAM or nearly full hard disk, CPU usage at expected
levels, well-tuned for performance (especially auto-start and
memory-resident processes).
In each of those cases, when I ran a SMART check of the hard drive, I
found that there were reports of relocated sectors, and that is an
indication of a drive that's in the process of failing. In each case,
after I replaced the hard drive, performance issues disappeared.
Smith
_______________________________________________
support-seamonkey mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
