On 22/01/14 17:30, Yasha Karant wrote:
> We have been converted without choice to a Microsoft Exchange
> proprietary email server, although IMAP service has been retained. I
> have 64 bit X86-64 Thunderbird on my office machine, and 32 bit IA-32
> Thunderbird on my laptop, both under SL6x (64 bit office, 32 bit
> laptop).  The office machine is 4 core, my laptop is 2 core.  On my
> office machine, when using the MS IMAP server, Thunderbird runs very,
> very slowly, with a single core reported load over 100 percent -- and
> does not appear to be using more than one core.  On my laptop,
> Thunderbird has acceptable performance, and typically shows a load of 10
> percent.  Office LAN is IEEE 802.3 at 100 Mbit/sec; home is over IEEE
> 802.11 through a DSL box from the telephone common carrier.
> 
> Anyone else having a similar experience?  Is 64 bit Tbird significantly
> different from 32 bit Tbird?

I haven't done any benchmarks, but the difference between the 32 and 64
bit should mostly be in addressing.  That itself shouldn't be much
noticeable.

But I do recognise your issues with a sluggish Thunderbird.  When my
employer moved my IMAP account many years ago from a server in Europe
(where I'm located) to a data center in the US, Thunderbird got
noticeably slower (IMAP access is only available via the in-house
networking, not publicly on the Internet - so capacity of the VPN
concentrators most likely caused longer network delays).

I solved that by using offlineimap + dovecot IMAP server locally.  That
made my Thunderbird really fast again.  So I presume it got something to
do with the networking code in Linux.  But the plus side here is that I
don't have to do any hassles with "offline mode" in Thunderbird, and I
have all mails available locally - in all programs supporting IMAP, even
without network access.

Another maybe not so related thing might be add-ons in Thunderbird.  I
remember that the earlier versions of the Lightning calendar add-on
caused serious Thunderbird lags, and often making Thunderbird not
responsive when updating the calendars.  I believe this issue was
particularly fixed around TB17 or so.  So I'd recommend you to do
benchmarks with all add-ons disabled, if you have anything loaded.


--
kind regards,

David Sommerseth