Richard Owlett wrote:
- If you're making extensive use of rules, that might have a
little effect, but possibly not dramatic.
I'm unsure of your use of "rules":
1. I have 16 filters to direct incoming to appropriate folder
2. I select from 14 customized rules for displaying a folder
I don't see how either could affect how long it would take SeaMonkey to
load.
I do not automatically load any mail/news. Until recently I was on
dialup, it caused annoyances.
I tend to use the term "rules" generically -- in Seamonkey those are
filters. The place where you could have problems would be with saved
filters that are virtual folders. If the logic of the rules is complex,
then you might see a performance issue, when the folders are
redisplaying (and search logic needs to be reapplied). If the focus of
the search isn't large, it shouldn't be an issue, but if you're
searching your entire profile (especially message bodies), then that
could contribute.
- 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 do run XP and my disk is running near 75% capacity. Essentially all
disk activity is SeaMonkey related. I will *NOT* be updating Widows -
will be shortly be moving to Linux.
No reason to upgrade, and it looks like you have plenty of reason not to
upgrade.
However, if you're running at close to 75% capacity, your disk is
effectively full. It may be that the only user application that you do
is Seamonkey, but Windows makes use of it as well. When the drive is
that close to capacity, the read/write heads are having to work a lot
harder, especially when writing, of finding available space.
Defragmentation will help a little bit, but you're ultimately working
around the physics of a mechanical hard drive.
Over the years, I've done a lot of cleanups of systems of non-technical
users, and after the problem of too many things auto-launching at
Windows login, the next most common problem of slow systems is full hard
drives (storage capacity >= 70%). Most often, this tends to be people
who have the habit of dumping the contents from SD cards on cameras to
their hard drives, or people with large music collections. I can't think
of a time when relocating the digital media content to another volume
hasn't had significant impact on overall performance.
In my own work, I have a number of implementations of Windows that I run
on virtual machines. I have a couple of VMs that have been short on
available storage space, and when I expanded those machines, the
improvement on performance has also been significant.
- 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 hibernate BECAUSE it is faster ;}
Also I have always be annoyed with how long XP takes to load after power
up on this machine [lenovo T43 laptop].
My oldest machine is a T43, and also with XP. The only reason I haven't
moved that one to Linux is that there's several things that that machine
runs that are Windows only.
For what it's worth, I have an old eee Netbook that works fine under
Xubuntu, although I only use that with a browser, and don't try to do
anything else (including a mail client).
- 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.
I don't know if this machine has any - purchased as a refurbished
machine several years ago. I've never intentionally added/activated any.
I've seen it happen occasionally that a new release of Mozilla may
trigger the need to disable acceleration, even without other changes to
hardware. I saw that happen with a ThinkPad W520 and Thunderbird, about
a year ago.
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.
I used an old Seagate diagnostic which reported no problems. I don't
recall if it ran any SMART tests. It's a Seagate specific diagnostic
that they had made available several years ago.
It's worth double-checking here.
However, the key initial indicator of SMART-related issues would be
slowness, where none of the normal bottlenecks turn up. If the Windows
task manager doesn't report high usage of CPU or memory, then SMART
status is a point of concern.
The tool I normally use is Crystal Disk Info (there's a portable version
available at portableapps.com). Another fast way to check is Speccy,
which comes from Piriform (the people who do CCleaner). No matter what
you use, the info is pretty much the same, although Speccy's
presentation is a little friendlier.
If it turns out that the hard drive is going bad, that might be an
indicator of the functional end of life of that machine. If I remember
correctly, the T43 is old enough that it doesn't support SATA drives.
You *might* be able to keep it going with a USB-to-SATA connector and
running a SATA drive in an external case (if you can convince the BIOS
to use that as a bootable drive).
In your particular case, I'm inclined to believe that your problem is
coming from a hard drive that doesn't have enough available space -- for
that, your only choices are either to get a bigger hard drive (which
seems to be unlikely, given the age of the machine), or find ways of
freeing space. If you're considering switching to a Linux
implementation, one of the smaller ones (with minimalist desktop) might
take less hard drive space than Windows XP, but that might only be
enough to get you adequate performance now, but not really give you much
space for further accumulation of new mail.
At that point, you may need to consider judicious pruning of your mail
store. I know that some people are meticulous about saving *everything*,
but if you're working around space limitations (and corresponding
performance issues), you may have to start making choices. In
particular, do you need every "me too" response, or replies to messages
with attachments (where the attachment is included in the reply)?
Especially, for threads that are 10+ years old?
If you make effective use of threaded display, and you find that there
are threads with multiple copies of the same attachment, one place where
you can gain notable amounts of space is in deleting attachments,
especially if the same attachment is other in another message in the thread.
Smith
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