General ranting about bad performance and freezes (all caused by upstream design problems, for example in Gloda or Mork)

[Ciccioposticcio]

Hi all,
first of all i want to thank the developers for the great work with Betterbird.
I just want to report a problem that unfortunately ruins my experience with Betterbird. Not less than one time at day, when i connect (IMAP) to my gmail account i experience a strong lag from Betterbird, while i can't do nothing on the app, not even close the window, all is freezed. After like 8-10 minutes Betterbird comes back to life and starts working properly again.
I cant remember a similar issue when I was using Thunderbird.
Windows 11 pro user, with sdd and 32Gb of RAM.

Best regards
Roberto

[Betterbird]

Please do the following things:

1. Test with Thunderbird. There are no changes in this area, so TB should behave just the same. In that case, please file an upstream bug.
2. Please submit a performance profile, see https://www.betterbird.eu/support/index.html#support-info, point 9.

Also note https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934197.

[Ciccioposticcio]

Tried also with Thunderbird and i can confirm i have no freezing issues with it.
Also i'm not able to do the performance profile with Betterbird because become not responding almost immediately after i start it, so i can't select the menù voice for the test and not even ctrl-shift-i works

[Betterbird]

You're using the same profile for TB and BB? How about creating a new profile for BB or using the TB profile?

[Ciccioposticcio]

well, i'm not sure i'm full understanding your message, i don't configured a "profile" . What i have done are two separate installations on my pc, keeping the defaults, both working with the same email account on gmail, both with IMAP and same configurations. Also i copied the filters for the messages from the BB configuration to the Thunderbird, so both the installations use the same message filters. Account settings are the same on BB and TB.

[Betterbird]

Start with -p to select a profile. Have a read of https://www.betterbird.eu/support/index.html#support-info, particularly point 10 (EDIT: now point 11).

Your report is not actionable since no one knows what causes the freezes. There is no significant difference between TB and BB that would give rise to drastically different behaviour.

[markusdd]

All I can do is confirm I am seeing the same, also since approx 2 weeks.
I have one installation under windows that 'inherited' a Thudnerbird profile many, many months ago when I switched, and a fully clean one under my Linux Fedora installation, and both exhibit the same behavior: they randomly lock up after some time.
almost daily now.

This was an issue some months back occasionally and then was good again for quite some time. Since about 2 weeks it's almost unusable, I find myself force-killing and restarting multiple times a day in severe instances.

[Betterbird]

Unfortunate, but based on the information given, this is not actionable. TB itself has some hangs that users complain about, but no one so far has provided sufficient information to track it down. Just a few I've come across recently:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934197
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1911950

[markusdd]

I failed miserably to produce a Perforamnce profile as the application would simply lock up, but what did seem to work wonders is clearing the startup-cache. Almost feels like a new program now.
Does this cache pollute over time or can it be corrupted over update cycles so that these propblems occur?

After clearing it it started like at least 2-3 times as quickly.

I am not sure what exactly it is for, but if it theoretically only accelerates startup a little I aam happy to just turn it off if it causes these woes.

(by the way, this is on a pretty performant machine, WIn11, Ryzen 5950x, 32GB of RAM, NVMe SSD. So system resources are certainly not scarce)

EDIT: ok, this RAM usage seems a little special

EDT2: and it just locked up again...so I guess this smells like a classic memory leak?

I am happy to provide more debug info but I am not sure how to aaddress that.

EDIT3: Winget just offered me 128.9, I was on 128.8 . I installed the update, at the moment RAM is sitting at 580MB stable without rising. So it would seem there was a fix right now, will keep observing.

[Betterbird]

All Mozilla-based software (FF, TB, BB) is a mix of C++, Rust and JS code. The JS code is cached in the startup cache. That should automatically be cleared when a new version is installed, since the cached script doesn't match the new version any more.

All Mozilla-based software is memory-hungry. Mine stands at 2 GB right now. That said, 14 GB seems a little heavy. 14 GB aren't 94% of 32 GB. What else is going on on the machine?

Any useful hints here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems ?

What are you doing in BB so it uses so much memory? Maybe you can watch the memory profile while doing the actions in BB.

[markusdd]

see my last Edit.
New version sits at about half a GB stable.
Nothing crazy in BB, 4 Accounts, but only 1 is actually large as it's my main.

Rest of RAM usage is Firefox and I had Blender open.
But that was never an issue and it is not right now because BB usually never used more than a GB.

Right now I'd assume 128.8 actually had a memory leak issue.

[Betterbird]

Right now I'd assume 128.8 actually had a memory leak issue.

Sure, there are heaps of memory leaks, but nothing that would explain 14 GB usage. And nothing was fixed between 128.8.0 and 128.9.0, at least not in the TB/BB code base.

Can we shift the blame to any anti-virus perhaps? 😉

[markusdd]

I only have Defender running like it comes with Win11. No special settings.
And as said, the issue was 1:1 the same on my Fedora install (no shared DB, the Fedora one runs on a completely seperate drive), so not even Windows specific.

I'm also not using many extensions, I only have google calendar integration, that's it. No special customized setting, themes etc.

[Betterbird]

Hmm, well, we won't solve the problem for you, since we can't reproduce it. You will need to explore it yourself. There should be some documentation on how to track it down, including using inbuilt tools. The developer toolbox has a Performance and a Memory tab. The Memory tab should give an indication where the memory is used.

Just for fun: CalDAV is know to consume huge amounts of memory. Can you run without without the Google calendar?

[rkrisztian]

I'm using Betterbird version 128.10.1esr-bb27 (installed as a Flatpak package) running on Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon (with all package updates installed), and I get freezes like all the time lately. I have to keep restarting the program every ~10 minutes because it gets constantly slower and slower as I use it.

Edit: Just as I started reporting my issue, something changed that I can't explain: now Betterbird is no longer freezing at the moment. The only difference I see is that: 1. I'm no longer getting new messages at the moment, 2. I no longer see the task bar icon that displays new messages (maybe it only shows up when there is a new message?).

[markusdd]

Yes. It is so bad for me I cannot even generate any reports or debug something, it just grinds to a complete halt almost instantly. That is why I stopped commenting here.
Thunderbird works fine for me right now, with the drawback of not being Betterbird 😅