THUNDERBIRD QUERY….I’ve been using Thunderbird for email for a few months now, and it definitely has some features I like. However, it has one feature I definitely don’t: it is awesomely slow and inefficient.
I mean this in a very specific way: if I check email, and then do absolutely nothing for 20 minutes, virtually every piece of code used by Thunderbird apparently gets dumped from physical memory. Click the icon to maximize the screen and the disk thrashes long enough to load 10 or 20 megabytes of code from virtual memory into RAM. Click an email to read it, and it loads another 10 or 20 MB of code. Click the “Junk” icon, ditto. Elapsed time to read and discard one piece of email from a running copy of Thunderbird: about 30 seconds.
And this is if I do nothing except leave the computer to eat lunch. If I actually use another program to do some work, Thunderbird appears to get unloaded from memory after about three or four minutes.
Does anyone have any idea what’s going on? Sure, I could probably use some more memory on my PC, but no other program acts like this. Outlook Express certainly didn’t. Even graphics programs, which are huge memory hogs, load and execute from scratch faster than Thunderbird does from the taskbar. Any knowledgable suggestions to improve Tbird’s memory management would be much appreciated.
POSTSCRIPT: Yes, I know that all my problems would go away if I would just buy a Macintosh or a Linux box. And my sex life would improve and Democrats would win a landslide victory in 2006. Consider me suitably advised.
