This is not to disparage Thunderbird or anything. Thunderbird is one of two mail user agents (MUA) I use regularly, the other being plain old mutt when I am connected to the home server using ssh.
The issue with Thunderbird is not functionality, but rather bloat. It takes up a lot of memory and is slow. Compared to for example, FireFox, on the same machine.
I don't think it's necessarily fair to compare Thunderbird to a web browser. TB has a lot more data to juggle than Firefox, in general. FF just has to deal with a couple of webpages at a time, while TB has to keep giant lists of messages at the ready. Also, just in terms of raw amounts of data, your average mbox has a lot more data than your average HTML page.
I've found TB to compare favorably, performance-wise, to other clients I've tried, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Evolution. (Although it's been a long time since I've tried Evolution.)
It definitely is much worse than other mail clients in my experience. 200MB+ to manage two IMAP accounts? I have now switched back to Kmail even though feature wise I like Thunderbird better. But kmail stays below a (relatively) reasonable 60MB.
I normally use elm, and I have dozens of mailboxes, some with thousands of old emails in them. ELm comes up very quickly, and moves around really fast. I use mutt for MIME stuff; it's almost as fast as elm. Firefox, while not having to deal with "all that data", at least comes up quickly and performs most actions rather speedily (until a couple of pages I have auto-updating have run for a while, anyway).
Thunderbird, OTOH, is much, much slower than elm or mutt, despite the fact that I haven't imported mo
No, you have to consider that Thunderbird is at version 0.9. When Firefox was at 0.9, it was not being compiled with optimizations. Unless you compile your own version of Thunderbird with optimizations enabled it's likely that they are disabled by default. I noticed a significant performance increase with Firefox from 0.9 to 1.0PR, for example.
Is it just me, or do other people have problems with Usenet reading? Sometimes it seems to stop reading new articles, as if no-one has posted to the group for a few days? And sometimes I find a thread consists of the same n articles repeated over and over, as if someone has replied to their own post about 5 times?
I've been wondering the same thing but haven't had the time to debug it at all. Here's a line from top:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 31929 rufus 16 0 668m 359m 169m S 0.0 36.0 3:08.69 mozilla-thunder
Yes, that is 350mb of ram it is using. True I have ~100 imap folders in my default view, a few of which have >100,000 messages, but I don't see the need to have the entire structure of each folder loaded persistently in ram.
I take it you're getting that by running top on linux. If so, that's a horrible way to measure memory usage. It includes in that number a LOT of things which are shared or just caches.
"Well hello there Charlie Brown, you blockhead."
-- Lucy Van Pelt
What about performance and memory usage? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not to disparage Thunderbird or anything. Thunderbird is one of two mail user agents (MUA) I use regularly, the other being plain old mutt when I am connected to the home server using ssh.
The issue with Thunderbird is not functionality, but rather bloat. It takes up a lot of memory and is slow. Compared to for example, FireFox, on the same machine.
Re:What about performance and memory usage? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've found TB to compare favorably, performance-wise, to other clients I've tried, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Evolution. (Although it's been a long time since I've tried Evolution.)
Re:What about performance and memory usage? (Score:1)
Sure, it's fair (Score:2)
Thunderbird, OTOH, is much, much slower than elm or mutt, despite the fact that I haven't imported mo
Re:What about performance and memory usage? (Score:2)
Re:What about performance and memory usage? (Score:1)
Re:What about performance and memory usage? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What about performance and memory usage? (Score:1)
Re:What about performance and memory usage? (Score:3, Informative)