On Sat, 3 Jan 2015, David Zuccaro <david.zuccaro@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
I have an i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz with 4Gb of memory running linux mint 17.
As the title suggests I'm finding Thunderbird to be very sluggish so I would welcome suggestions to help boost performance. (actually evolution was better in this regard)
I've just upgraded my desktop PC to 8G of RAM. Even with swap on SSD 4G wasn't enough when I had some long lived Chromium or Chrome tabs. It seems that 4G isn't regarded as a lot of RAM nowadays so lots of apps are getting wasteful. More RAM might help. Also SSD is really cheap, $120 to add an SSD to a desktop PC will dramatically improve performance. Use SSD for root, /home, and swap and then use the hard drive for the big stuff.
I have moved about 6 years worth of emails into the archive directory -- I presume exporting these out of Thunderbird into a searchable format (which one?) would help matters.
Alternative mail reader suggestions are welcome. I'm using gmail (imap.googlemail.com) should I look at hosting my own email server? Digital ocean?
It might be worth trying to put only a few years email in each folder. For Kmail I found that keeping folders to about 15,000 messages improved performance a lot both directly and indirectly because searches became faster as I generally knew which year I wanted to search in. For storage of old mail I currently use an IMAP server on my LAN with caching IMAP (so my laptop can read it all when I'm travelling) and only have the more recent mail in my regular IMAP server. This means that my phone can't access the tens of thousands of ancient messages which is more of a feature than a bug! I think that everyone here should host their own mail server. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/