Question

What is the mailbox size limit in Thunderbird before performance degrades?

Asked by: cvonrabe

One of our users has a total mailbox size of about 20 gigs.  Granted there are a few e-mail accounts coming in and its not all going into the inbox, its segregated into other folders.  I am too unfamiliar with Thunderbird to determine if these are all different folders inside of one file or different files altogether (the equivalent of numerous PST files in Outlook).  Anyways she has been complaining lately that Thunderbird is running slow and hanging here and there.  I think its because of the extreme amount of messages but she claims its always worked well before.  I did check and the data is being compressed.

My question is this, how much is too much?  I think she needs to clean up some of that e-mail but of course if Thunderbird can work fine under those conditions I see no problem with her keeping them.  Is there anything I can check to determine possible causes of this?

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Asked On
2009-10-14 at 08:05:14ID24811475
Tags

Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail

Topics

Thunderbird Email Client

,

Mozilla Web Browser

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Answers

 

by: Let_Me_BePosted on 2009-10-14 at 08:17:19ID: 25571529

I know people that are using a single folder installation with 1k mails each day, and Thunderbird works fine for them.

Try creating a new empty profile, it usually helps a lot.

 

by: giltjrPosted on 2009-10-14 at 08:29:21ID: 25571679

What is compressing the files?  I did not realize that Thunderbird had any compression.

If  you are talking about Windows file compression, this could be causing performance problems.  If Windows is doing the compression, then each time Thunderbird read/writes, the Windows must decompress/compress.

I don't know what business you are in, but I would assume that 20 GB of e-mail contains a lot of old e-mail.  Unless you are legally required to keep it, it could be a legal issue if you were ever required to do discover on all of that e-mail.

Do you have a document retention policy?

 

by: cvonrabePosted on 2009-10-14 at 08:44:06ID: 25571856

Yes we have a document retention policy.  I'm sure some of those e-mails we would be required to keep but I have a feeling a lot of them can go.  Thunderbird does come with compression and I have read that can speed it up thought I was always under the impression compression slows down performance.  WE are not using any Windows compression

 

by: giltjrPosted on 2009-10-14 at 09:44:33ID: 25572493

Can you point me to where you set compression up in Thunderbird?  I can't find a compression option.  Now there is a compact option, but that does not compress the data, it removes deleted e-mail.  Deleted e-mail is actually left in your inbox, but is marked as deleted.  When you compact a folder in Thunderbird it goes though and actually removes deleted e-mail from that folder to get rid of the unneeded mail.

Well, compression can speed things up in some situation.  However these situation are normally when you are sending data over a "slow" network connection.

Compressing files locally is typically done to save disk space and adds the overhead of decompression/compression to slow things up.

 

by: mtz1of4Posted on 2009-10-14 at 15:08:22ID: 25575713

it's not compression, it's compacting which rebuilds the index file when old emails are deleted.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders


The easiest way to see if something is slowing her down is to backup her profile and create a new one, then migrate necessary emails if needed.

This page may help with keeping it working
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_-_Thunderbird

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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