Thunderbird freezes ~2min randomly when composing an email

[xmontero]

Hi there,

Thunderbird freezes for about 2 minutes every 5 minutes approximately when composing an email.

- I have already tested to restart in safe-mode disabling any add-ons.
- I have already checked that my antivirus (AVG Free) does not scan emails. In fact it is not "disabled" but even "not installed" the extension named "Web and email"

It still happens when in safe-mode.

I know this has been already asked over years. Forum threads typically are "try this, try this, try this..." with a bit of blind-trial-and-error.

To avoid this, I don't want to ask "what's happening" or "how do I solve this".

What I want to ask is:

How can I see "activity logs" so the next time it freezes I can read them and see "what happened" in the last 5 minutes so we can explore it there's any key to the problem in there?

I mean: A log with all connections to servers, file-access, etc... I manage about 10 accounts, several to gmail and hotmail and several to custom dovecot servers. All is IMAP.

[DanRaisch]

As a test, use menu path Tools->Options->Composition->General->uncheck "Auto Save every NN minutes". Close and restart the program and see if that resolved the freezing issue.
Assuming it does, how do you use Thunderbird with those IMAP accounts? Do you access those accounts from multiple computers where you would need access to Sent messages from each system?

[xmontero]

Will try! It might have relation!

In the meantime:

* I don't access mail from multiple devices at the same time.
* One of the accounts is the one in my android mobile phone, but I don't use mail in the phone, except on demand.
* So when this happens I'm not polling from multiple devices. From the computer only.
* I don't save "sent" to the "Sent" special folder. I have thunderbird configured to save "sent" to my Inbox, so I see complete conversations: "What arrives from the outside" + "what I answer" in the same inbox folder.

In any case, I'd still like to know how can I access all the activity-log.

Thnx for the suggestion.

[DanRaisch]

Re logging -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_logging_for_mail/news

What is selected as the target folder for saving Draft messages? If it is on the server side of that IMAP set up, that might be another possible source of the lag/freezes.

[xmontero]

After month and a half with auto-save disabled, the problem has not happened.

@DanRaisch => I'll enable the auto-saving again to watch the logs, thanks for the tip.

Now questions:

a) How can I configure that "auto-saving" is done in background so it does not freeze the frontend?
b) Why the auto-save triggers something that lasts 2 minutes? Even if the auto-save is in the imap server, it should take 1 sec? 2sec? 3 sec? 10? but 2 minutes??! With simple text? (no images, no binaries, no attachments)

[tanstaafl]

a) You can't, as far as I know.

b) Auto-saving of a draft to a remote folder should normally take a couple of seconds, but could take much longer if there is a problem with the IMAP server or you have a really poor tcp-ip connection to the server. If it takes a long time trying pinging the server to see how long the round trip took, and whether there was any data loss. You could compare the results with another server that you don't have a problem with, to get a feel for how bad the numbers are.

I suggest you experiment with using a draft folder from a different account to see if the server was to blame. You may get different results depending upon the time of the day if the server was overloaded.

I entered "cmd" (with no quotes) at the windows search field , pressed Enter to create a console window, and then typed ping followed by the imap servers name in the console window to ping my Fastmail accounts IMAP server

C:\Users\Eric>ping mail.messagingengine.com

Pinging mail.messagingengine.com [66.111.4.52] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 66.111.4.52: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=55
Reply from 66.111.4.52: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=55
Reply from 66.111.4.52: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=55
Reply from 66.111.4.52: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=55

Ping statistics for 66.111.4.52:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 16ms, Maximum = 17ms, Average = 16ms

The mail server is about 280 miles away from me in Bridgewater, New Jersey. I tested six other accounts (including gmail, yahoo, outlook and my ISP) and they all had 0% loss and around 30ms average round trip times.

[wsmwk]

a) correct, there is no async/delayed saving of drafts
b) as a workaround, in account settings you could try changing drafts to point to a local folder and thus eliminate the remote access piece. If that helps, when you know remote access is the problem. if it doesn't help, then you know the issue is local to your PC, perhaps AV or backup softare