Filter editing slow

[Brad Waite]

Nearly everything about creating or editing filters is extremely slow. It literally takes 20+ seconds for the Filter Rules window to pop up after clicking Edit on the Message Filters list. I've got 6 accounts in Thunderbird, and about 75 filters between all the account.

What could be causing this behavior?

I've been dealing with this for a few years, but since I added a bunch of filters today and figured I'd finally ask about it.

[DanRaisch]

How many filters do you have in that account and what is the size of the file msgFilterRules.dat?

[Brad Waite]

Account 1: 25 filters, 6.04 KB
Account 2: 3 filters, 477 B
Account 3: 25 filters, 6 KB
Account 4: 14 filters, 3.32 KB
Account 5: 5 filters, 1.08 KB
Account 6: 1 filter, 146 B
Account 7: 3 filters, 520 B

[DanRaisch]

Assuming those "B" entries should have been "KB" those aren't exceptional figures.
Try this for the worst offender: Close Thunderbird. Open the file msgFilterRules.dat in the sub-directory for the account using a text editor. Briefly review the text in the file to ensure there are no non-readable characters visible. If it's clean, left mouse click on the first character in the file and then scroll down and, holding down the Shift key, click on the last character of the filter text. Press Ctrl+C to copy that text. Open a new file in the editor, paste the copied text into it and then save the file with the name msgFilterRulesdat.NEW. Close the editor and rename msgFilterRules.dat to msgFilterRulesdat.OLD and then rename msgFilterRulesdat.NEW to msgFilterRules.dat. Launch Thunderbird and try editing the filters for that account to see if there is any improvement in performance.

[Brad Waite]

Those B entries were bytes.

I renamed all of the msgFilterRules.dat and restarted Thunderbird, to see the behavior with a completely empty filter set. The Message Filters window popped up quick enough, but it was still 20+ seconds after hitting New... before the Filter Rules dialog appeared. So it doesn't appear it has anything to do with the content of the msgFilterRules.dat files themselves.

Any other suggestions?

[DanRaisch]

It takes a second or less for that Filter dialogue to open here.

Does the same thing occur if you launch the application in Mozilla Safe Mode? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode

[Brad Waite]

Interesting...

I get varying speeds in safe mode. Sometimes 1-2 seconds, sometimes 15+ seconds. I'd say the average is 5s.

Still way slower than I would expect.

[Brad Waite]

I did a bit more playing.

It appears that regardless of whether I'm in Safe mode or not, the initial filter edit dialog takes 20+ seconds to show up. Opening any filter to edit after that, regardless of the account, takes a varying amount of time, from nearly instantaneous, to 8-9 seconds.

I'm stumped. What gives?

[DanRaisch]

What gives?

Haven't a clue.

[Brad Waite]

Is there some way of debugging what is going on during that initial delay?

Could it be affected by the amount of mail I have, both in active accounts and archived?

What about my LocalFolders? Does the mail filter engine have to go look at all the folders, including LocalFolders before waking up? Mine is on a NAS, and while my network share is always mounted, and fast to browse in Windows, sometimes it takes a while to expand my LocalFolders tree from within Thunderbird.

Thanks for the help, BTW. This is bizarre behavior and I'm glad, to some extent, it's not something simple I've missed.

[DanRaisch]

I can't say yes or no but it would truly surprise me if the process of bringing up the filter editor dialogue calls for opening or scanning any folders, including the one that is displayed when the editor is launched. There wouldn't seem to be any reason to do that.