[Dovecot] Thunderbird very slow startup, 1.2.11, mbox, postfix local delivery to /var/mail

[Charles Marcus]

On 2010-05-07 1:02 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> I know TBird isn't the greatest IMAP client around,

Actually, its better than most (at least those with a decent GUI)...

> but I think taking over
> 60 seconds just to download ~300 messages is way too damn long given the
> hardware resources, network, and load on the client and server machines.

There is definitely something wrong.

Do you store your profile on a remote filesystem? There is a known major
TB bug that causes it to be dog slow if your profile is not on a local
hard drive. It is apparently fixed for 3.1, and I think it even made it
into the 3.1b2 that was just released, so you might give it a try if
your profile is on a remote filesystem.

> TB basically seems to be pulling, or dovecot serving, only about 5
> messages/sec over 100Mb ethernet, which is abysmal performance given neither
> the server nor client have any load.  The messages are mostly list mail
> which are at max a few kilobytes each.
> 
> I'm leaning toward a problem with TBird but I've been unable to find a bug
> report that covers this, nor a forum post anywhere, etc.  The closest I've
> found for "slow startup" are recommendations to compact folders.  I have no
> local folders to compact.  I delete immediately and expunge on exit.

Ummm... compacting has nothing to do with 'Local Folders', it has to do
with the local mbox files that are used to store the message headers
(and bodies of downloaded messages) - and simply expunging is *not*
enough. You need to either manually compact them every now and then, or
set it to automatically compact regularly.

-- 

Best regards,

Charles