Memory usage grows from 300 MB to 900 MB over several days (4 pop, 1 rss)
Thunderbird 52.4.0, running on Win7 Pro with 8 GB RAM; two POP accounts = very straightforward & simple usage
Thunderbird memory consumption normally starts around 300 MB for me. If I leave it running for three or four days with no restarts, memory usage gradually but steadily increases to over 900 MB. Even with an 8 GB system, that's still enough to start slowing things down when I also have 10 or 15 Chrome tabs open (easily 2 GB of memory, since Chrome seems to be a BIG memory hog), several PDFs open in Adobe reader, several Word docs open, several Excel spreadsheets open, and two or three instances of Windows Explorer open (which is a surprisingly big memory user). I'm probably going to upgrade to 12 GB, but I shouldn't have to do it because of a Thunderbird memory leak!
Modified by Wayne Mery
All Replies (4)
What is the interval set for checking for new mail for the two accounts? How long has this been happening? What addons are installed?
Wayne,
The two main POP accounts are set to check every 5 minutes.
Two rarely used POP accounts (which I had forgotten about) check every 60 min for one (GMail) and every 360 min for the other (AT&T). There is also one RSS account (which I had also forgotten about) that doesn't receive anything any more since I cancelled the subscription. It checks every 720 minutes.
This has been happening for a long time. I was previously using a 32-bit machine with limited (3.5 GB) memory, so I was more conscientious about closing down apps on that machine almost every day. I rarely let the T-bird memory usage get above 500 MB. I moved to a 64-bit machine with 8 GB in early September, and I leave apps open much longer on that machine. So I've been especially noticing the memory leak since then. I tend to restart it when it gets to 700 MB, but I let it run a few days ago until it reached 900 MB. Right now it's been running for about one day and it's at 450 MB.
See the attached screenimage for my add-ons.
I use the Tag Toolbar every day, the Remove Duplicate Messages every month (when T-bird screws up and downloads duplicate messages for some unknown reason), and the ImportExportTools almost but not quite never. The two Adblock add-ins were added automatically when I added them to Firefox. It's not clear that they make any sense on T-bird, but I figure Mozilla must have some reason for automatically adding them.
1. Turn off rss checks for articles at startup and intervals 2. remove adblock plus
Please report your findings
Wayne Mery said
1. Turn off rss checks for articles at startup and intervals 2. remove adblock plus Please report your findings
gfwalker,
did you get some results?