Thunderbird 3.1.10 intermittently unresponsive 5-30 seconds

[jeff.welling]

MERobison: I had begun to suspect that bad network behavior may have played a part in the problem I was having, is there any chance your Internet is lagging and/or experiencing other difficulty while Thunderbird is acting up?
I was on a wireless connection from a distance.

I hadn't mentioned it before because I didn't see much of a correlation at the time and other troubleshooting seemed to discount it, but for lack of finding a solution I think it deserves noting. It's not much, just that I noticed my room mate was trying to stream a hockey game and was having difficulty and at the same time with Thunderbird locking up irregularly often, and for slightly longer (though, I may have just been short-tempered at the time).

Does anyone know if such a delay in network communication would interrupt the TB UI, or if they are separated?

[MERobison]

This is definitely not internet related. It occurs while at work on a very fast connection, it occurs at home, occurs in other cities while traveling... both laptops still experiencing it, and it seems to actually be getting worse, or perhaps that is perception because it happens every so often (maybe every 10 min). I have changed all my time settings (ie. check mail, auto save, etc), so it isn't related to mine. I'm positive it is the latest version of TB. Not sure why everyone isn't experiencing it though. Very annoying.

[syg]

I'm experiencing the same problem. My config is Mac OSX 10.6.8, TB 6.0, 4GB RAM. I use two mailboxes, and each now has about 2GB of mail, all sitting in TB.

If the Message Compose window is open, all the text I type is buffered but not displayed. If I save the message to Draft (Cmd-S) while composing, my typed text shows up immediately.

TB freezes sometimes even when I haven't opened the Compose window.

I suspect it's a problem with the memory management of TB. Probably the entire mail index is loaded into memory for quick access, and this leaves no space in the allocated memory for the Message Compose text buffer.

Incidentally, the freeze was also affecting my Firefox installation till recently, but now it seems to be fixed (maybe due to the Firefox 6.0 update?)