Thunderbird Performance Issues

Hi -- I've been testing out the Thunderbird email
client at a single secretarial station at a law
office that otherwise uses Outlook Express for
their email. The idea was to see if Thunderbird
had matured enough for it to be safe, reliable,
all-purpose replacement for OE.

The secretarial station previously had the
latest Mozilla build at the time, but that had
some odd problems with emails containing a large
number of attachments, so a couple of weeks ago I
put on Thunderbird 1.02 in place of it and
imported all the Mozilla email.

While Thunderbird didn't have an attachment
issues, its performance became a problem. There
were huge amounts of email coming at the station
and Thunderbird has been consistently sluggish
in opening folders, with constant "building
summary file" messages. I compacted the folders,
tried deleting/rebuilding the msf files, but
nothing really helped with the speed. I left
Mozilla on the system and that was still much
faster in direct comparisons. The PC itself is
no speed demon, a Dell Dimension 2200 with a
1.3-GHz Celeron processor and 128 Mb of memory
retrofitted with Win98 (it was a replacement
for an older system with a lot of specialized
apps, so it was simply cloned over and new
drivers installed), but it's certainly should
have been fast enough for email processing.

The bottom line is that I've been asked to put
the workstation on Outlook Express like all the
others in the office because of the performance
problem. That's unfortunate. I've used
Thunderbird on my home PC for a while, and I've
noticed that while its performance has improved
through its different builds, it's still not in
Firefox's league in terms of speed compared to
the old Mozilla/Netscape software. I don't have
to deal with enormous amounts of mail so the
tradeoff of speed for features is OK for me.

I'm wondering if anyone has had similar issues
with using Thunderbird in a high volume email
environment. Or if are there any performance
tricks I should look at and try.

-BC

Re: Thunderbird Performance Issues

Follow-up -- I tried archiving most of the mail, which reduced the size
of the Sent folder from over 8000 emails to about 400. That brought
back acceptible speed, but...

-BC

Re: Thunderbird Performance Issues

On another note, I've been pretty satisfied with Thunderbird
performance, except one thing: the manual junk mail flag
setting/resetting (you know, when a mail is incorrectly tagged as junk
or non-junk, and then you press the little red dot in the junk status
column, or the "Mark the selected message as junk/nonjunk" button. It
takes at least 5-10 second for it to complete and my training.dat is
only 5MB. Does it have to be that slow???

Regards,
Pascal Damian

Re: Thunderbird Performance Issues

* BC wrote:
> Follow-up -- I tried archiving most of the mail, which reduced the size
> of the Sent folder from over 8000 emails to about 400. That brought
> back acceptible speed, but...

I was having extreme performance problems in OE with less emails than
that. We are an engineering office, so most emails contained AutoCAD
drawing attachment, usually zipped, so while there were less emails the
file size was quite large.

Thunderbird seemed to handle these better IMO.

--
T R O Y P I G G I N S
e : usenet@piggo.com

Re: Thunderbird Performance Issues

Troy Piggins wrote:
> * BC wrote:
> > Follow-up -- I tried archiving most of the mail, which reduced the
size
> > of the Sent folder from over 8000 emails to about 400. That brought
> > back acceptible speed, but...
>
> I was having extreme performance problems in OE with less emails than
> that. We are an engineering office, so most emails contained AutoCAD
> drawing attachment, usually zipped, so while there were less emails
the
> file size was quite large.
>
> Thunderbird seemed to handle these better IMO.

I was thinking of blaming the sheer number of emails
for the performance issue (as well as the insanely
bloated, performance-sucking HP software that had
been installed for one of those all-in-one printer/
fax/scanners) and how OE would likely have choked on
importing that many emails.

With the current reduced size of the email folders,
the performance issue seems to have gone away. Still,
my own personal Thunderbird experience indicates
that it's still not a speedster. I've never used OE,
so I can't compare that, but I've been using some
sort of flavor of Netcape/Mozilla from back when
Netscape was a hot company and a threat to Microsoft.
(It was sad to see how AOL completely f*cked up
whatever was left of the company) and I think
Thunderbird seem to be the slowest version yet. It
does have a lot of features, though, and it does
IMAP great.

-BC

Re: Thunderbird Performance Issues

* BC wrote:
> It does have a lot of features, though, and it does IMAP great.

Agreed there. That is all we use it for - IMAP. No POP any more.

--
T R O Y P I G G I N S
e : usenet@piggo.com

Re: Thunderbird Performance Issues

Troy Piggins wrote in message news:...
> * BC wrote:
> > It does have a lot of features, though, and it does IMAP great.
>
> Agreed there. That is all we use it for - IMAP. No POP any more.

Are you sure?

Regards,
Slava Shevtsov

http://www.sciletter.com/ - mailer with equations