Discussion:
Seamonkey performance issue
NFN Smith
2014-03-14 20:54:52 UTC
Permalink
I have an odd/frustrating performance problem with Seamonkey 2.24
(although I've been seeing this for several previous versions), running
on Windows 7 Professional. Computer is a bit old, running an Intel
Mobile Core 2 Duo processor, and has 8 GB of RAM.

I use Seamonkey for both browser and mail/news, as well as occasional
work with the HTML composer tool.

Symptoms:

There are times when I'm working in Seamonkey, and I get temporary
freezes (typically 10-20 seconds), where Seamonkey refuses any kind of
input from either keyboard or mouse. When this happens, I can use
Alt-Tab to move from window to Window, but if I do a mouse-over, putting
the pointer over a Seamonkey icon in the Windows Taskbar, most of the
windows show a wait cursor. This happens whether I'm working in the
mail client, the browser, or even the composer. Sometimes, when this
happens, I'll get a switch of focus from one open Seamonkey window to
another (e.g., I'm composing an email message, and suddenly the focus
switches to the browser window).

When the problem happens, I'm not seeing any indication of overall
performance issues on the machine, just Seamonkey. A check of the
Windows Task Manager often shows relatively high CPU usage (up to about
50%) by Seamonkey, whether Seamonkey's memory usage is a few hundred MB,
or over a GB. Restarting Seamonkey seems not to have any effect.


I use Seamonkey on a number of machines, both Windows and Linux, but
this is the only place where I'm seeing this issue. This is my primary
working profile. I typically have 5-10 browser tabs open at a time. In
mail, I have 4 POP accounts active (no IMAP), as well as 4 news servers
defined, and a varying number of newsgroup subscriptions.

I know that the normal first thing to do when addressing performance
issues is to disable extensions (and I have about 30 extensions active),
but I'm finding pretty much the same behavior if I run in Safe Mode.
I've also seen and worked through suggestions relating to Flash
(including disabling the Flash plugin), but no improvement there, either.

To me, this one indicates some sort of background process that's active
(possibly related to mail), but I can't identify it.

I would consider my user profile to not be overly big -- even with a lot
of stored mail from POP accounts, the profile is less than 1 GB, and I'm
pretty aggressive about keeping my Inbox and trash folders pared down.

Given timing of the problem (sometimes, two or three times in an hour),
I'm wondering if there might be something related to POP settings. In
my main working account I have quite a few mail filters active, most for
delivering received content to folders, as well as several search
folders active.

Any ideas of what's happening, and how I might identify what's causing this?

Smith
Daniel
2014-03-15 09:48:11 UTC
Permalink
Post by NFN Smith
I have an odd/frustrating performance problem with Seamonkey 2.24
(although I've been seeing this for several previous versions), running
on Windows 7 Professional. Computer is a bit old, running an Intel
Mobile Core 2 Duo processor, and has 8 GB of RAM.
I use Seamonkey for both browser and mail/news, as well as occasional
work with the HTML composer tool.
There are times when I'm working in Seamonkey, and I get temporary
freezes (typically 10-20 seconds), where Seamonkey refuses any kind of
input from either keyboard or mouse. When this happens, I can use
Alt-Tab to move from window to Window, but if I do a mouse-over, putting
the pointer over a Seamonkey icon in the Windows Taskbar, most of the
windows show a wait cursor. This happens whether I'm working in the
mail client, the browser, or even the composer. Sometimes, when this
happens, I'll get a switch of focus from one open Seamonkey window to
another (e.g., I'm composing an email message, and suddenly the focus
switches to the browser window).
When the problem happens, I'm not seeing any indication of overall
performance issues on the machine, just Seamonkey. A check of the
Windows Task Manager often shows relatively high CPU usage (up to about
50%) by Seamonkey, whether Seamonkey's memory usage is a few hundred MB,
or over a GB. Restarting Seamonkey seems not to have any effect.
I use Seamonkey on a number of machines, both Windows and Linux, but
this is the only place where I'm seeing this issue. This is my primary
working profile. I typically have 5-10 browser tabs open at a time. In
mail, I have 4 POP accounts active (no IMAP), as well as 4 news servers
defined, and a varying number of newsgroup subscriptions.
I know that the normal first thing to do when addressing performance
issues is to disable extensions (and I have about 30 extensions active),
but I'm finding pretty much the same behavior if I run in Safe Mode.
I've also seen and worked through suggestions relating to Flash
(including disabling the Flash plugin), but no improvement there, either.
To me, this one indicates some sort of background process that's active
(possibly related to mail), but I can't identify it.
I would consider my user profile to not be overly big -- even with a lot
of stored mail from POP accounts, the profile is less than 1 GB, and I'm
pretty aggressive about keeping my Inbox and trash folders pared down.
Given timing of the problem (sometimes, two or three times in an hour),
I'm wondering if there might be something related to POP settings. In
my main working account I have quite a few mail filters active, most for
delivering received content to folders, as well as several search
folders active.
Any ideas of what's happening, and how I might identify what's causing this?
Smith
Smithy, about the only thing I could suggest would be to compact your
mail folders ... File->Empty Trash and then File->Compact Folders.
--
Daniel

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/28.0 SeaMonkey/2.25 Build identifier: 20140211200211

or

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101
SeaMonkey/2.25 Build identifier: 20140211195952
NFN Smith
2014-03-17 18:24:18 UTC
Permalink
Post by Daniel
about the only thing I could suggest would be to compact your
mail folders ... File->Empty Trash and then File->Compact Folders.
Interesting...

I routinely empty my trash folders, and I also am pretty deliberate
about manually compacting individual folders, if I've done a lot of
shuffling of messages (or deleting attachments).

My initial inclination was to dismiss this suggestion. However, I did
did take this advice, and did a general compaction of folders, and this
morning, I'm noticing far less performance lags, than before. There's
still a little there, but the annoyance level is far lower.


One other thing that I've thought of, is that the profile that I'm
working from dates all the way back to Netscape Suite, maybe even version 4.

Thus, over a lot of years, there's a lot of cruft that has built up in
the prefs.js file -- not just stuff that can be cleared with Safe Mode,
but junk like definitions of old printers that are long gone.

I have contemplated the idea of a full rebuild of the profile from
scratch. It's easy enough to reset most of my prefs (including in
extensions) by hand and transfer user data, including mail store,
address book, server configs, bookmarks, etc., although I'm not
super-eager to have to rebuild all my mail-handling rules.

Smith
Daniel
2014-03-18 08:44:01 UTC
Permalink
Post by NFN Smith
Post by Daniel
about the only thing I could suggest would be to compact your
mail folders ... File->Empty Trash and then File->Compact Folders.
Interesting...
I routinely empty my trash folders, and I also am pretty deliberate
about manually compacting individual folders, if I've done a lot of
shuffling of messages (or deleting attachments).
My initial inclination was to dismiss this suggestion. However, I did
did take this advice, and did a general compaction of folders, and this
morning, I'm noticing far less performance lags, than before. There's
still a little there, but the annoyance level is far lower.
One other thing that I've thought of, is that the profile that I'm
working from dates all the way back to Netscape Suite, maybe even version 4.
Thus, over a lot of years, there's a lot of cruft that has built up in
the prefs.js file -- not just stuff that can be cleared with Safe Mode,
but junk like definitions of old printers that are long gone.
I have contemplated the idea of a full rebuild of the profile from
scratch. It's easy enough to reset most of my prefs (including in
extensions) by hand and transfer user data, including mail store,
address book, server configs, bookmarks, etc., although I'm not
super-eager to have to rebuild all my mail-handling rules.
Smith
Smithy, glad to hear that the compaction has had a good effect.

If you want to go ahead with the new profile, try Tools->Switch
Profiles->Manage Profiles->Create Profile and on the second screen,
where you determine where to locate the new profile, give it a
distinctive name. When you have set up the basic profile, you should be
able to copy/move files from your current profile into your new profile
and install latest versions of any extensions you use.
--
Daniel

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/28.0 SeaMonkey/2.25 Build identifier: 20140211200211

or

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101
SeaMonkey/2.25 Build identifier: 20140211195952
stan pierce
2014-03-15 22:51:26 UTC
Permalink
Post by NFN Smith
I have an odd/frustrating performance problem with Seamonkey 2.24
(although I've been seeing this for several previous versions), running
on Windows 7 Professional. Computer is a bit old, running an Intel
Mobile Core 2 Duo processor, and has 8 GB of RAM.
I use Seamonkey for both browser and mail/news, as well as occasional
work with the HTML composer tool.
There are times when I'm working in Seamonkey, and I get temporary
freezes (typically 10-20 seconds), where Seamonkey refuses any kind of
input from either keyboard or mouse. When this happens, I can use
Alt-Tab to move from window to Window, but if I do a mouse-over, putting
the pointer over a Seamonkey icon in the Windows Taskbar, most of the
windows show a wait cursor. This happens whether I'm working in the
mail client, the browser, or even the composer. Sometimes, when this
happens, I'll get a switch of focus from one open Seamonkey window to
another (e.g., I'm composing an email message, and suddenly the focus
switches to the browser window).
When the problem happens, I'm not seeing any indication of overall
performance issues on the machine, just Seamonkey. A check of the
Windows Task Manager often shows relatively high CPU usage (up to about
50%) by Seamonkey, whether Seamonkey's memory usage is a few hundred MB,
or over a GB. Restarting Seamonkey seems not to have any effect.
I use Seamonkey on a number of machines, both Windows and Linux, but
this is the only place where I'm seeing this issue. This is my primary
working profile. I typically have 5-10 browser tabs open at a time. In
mail, I have 4 POP accounts active (no IMAP), as well as 4 news servers
defined, and a varying number of newsgroup subscriptions.
I know that the normal first thing to do when addressing performance
issues is to disable extensions (and I have about 30 extensions active),
but I'm finding pretty much the same behavior if I run in Safe Mode.
I've also seen and worked through suggestions relating to Flash
(including disabling the Flash plugin), but no improvement there, either.
To me, this one indicates some sort of background process that's active
(possibly related to mail), but I can't identify it.
I would consider my user profile to not be overly big -- even with a lot
of stored mail from POP accounts, the profile is less than 1 GB, and I'm
pretty aggressive about keeping my Inbox and trash folders pared down.
Given timing of the problem (sometimes, two or three times in an hour),
I'm wondering if there might be something related to POP settings. In
my main working account I have quite a few mail filters active, most for
delivering received content to folders, as well as several search
folders active.
Any ideas of what's happening, and how I might identify what's causing this?
Smith
I'm getting these problems to the point of my system being unusable.
Often I notice that something is being transferred and checking Google
find that the site of the transfer is one of the sites where info is
duplicated for faster access. For example, akamaihd.net. I seem to run
OK if I switch to using I.E.
NFN Smith
2014-07-21 23:34:44 UTC
Permalink
Or at least, what seems to be a satisfactory work-around...
Post by NFN Smith
I have an odd/frustrating performance problem with Seamonkey 2.24
(although I've been seeing this for several previous versions), running
on Windows 7 Professional. Computer is a bit old, running an Intel
Mobile Core 2 Duo processor, and has 8 GB of RAM.
I use Seamonkey for both browser and mail/news, as well as occasional
work with the HTML composer tool.
There are times when I'm working in Seamonkey, and I get temporary
freezes (typically 10-20 seconds), where Seamonkey refuses any kind of
input from either keyboard or mouse. When this happens, I can use
Alt-Tab to move from window to Window, but if I do a mouse-over, putting
the pointer over a Seamonkey icon in the Windows Taskbar, most of the
windows show a wait cursor. This happens whether I'm working in the
mail client, the browser, or even the composer.
I'm just moving my configs to a new computer. I was hoping that that
would be the solution, but it turns out that I was still having the same
symptoms, and where the problem was seeming to be related to mail/news.

I did some further poking, and discovered that I had several news
servers all set to check for new articles every 60 minutes. One of them
is AIOE, which I've often found to be particularly slow.

I tried playing with these settings, changing the frequency higher (to
around two hours), but on different cycle for each server (e.g., 115
mins, 120 mins, 125 minutes, etc), that server checks aren't running at
the same time, and the problem seems to have gone away. I didn't have
checking for new messages at startup enabled, but I have noticed that
the mail client does seem to start a little faster, anyway.

It's nice to see that Seamonkey is behaving a lot better (and that I
don't have to go through all the effort of rebuilding the profile by hand).

Smith
Ray_Net
2014-07-22 06:13:49 UTC
Permalink
Post by NFN Smith
Or at least, what seems to be a satisfactory work-around...
Post by NFN Smith
I have an odd/frustrating performance problem with Seamonkey 2.24
(although I've been seeing this for several previous versions), running
on Windows 7 Professional. Computer is a bit old, running an Intel
Mobile Core 2 Duo processor, and has 8 GB of RAM.
I use Seamonkey for both browser and mail/news, as well as occasional
work with the HTML composer tool.
There are times when I'm working in Seamonkey, and I get temporary
freezes (typically 10-20 seconds), where Seamonkey refuses any kind of
input from either keyboard or mouse. When this happens, I can use
Alt-Tab to move from window to Window, but if I do a mouse-over, putting
the pointer over a Seamonkey icon in the Windows Taskbar, most of the
windows show a wait cursor. This happens whether I'm working in the
mail client, the browser, or even the composer.
I'm just moving my configs to a new computer. I was hoping that that
would be the solution, but it turns out that I was still having the
same symptoms, and where the problem was seeming to be related to
mail/news.
I did some further poking, and discovered that I had several news
servers all set to check for new articles every 60 minutes. One of
them is AIOE, which I've often found to be particularly slow.
I tried playing with these settings, changing the frequency higher (to
around two hours), but on different cycle for each server (e.g., 115
mins, 120 mins, 125 minutes, etc), that server checks aren't running
at the same time, and the problem seems to have gone away. I didn't
have checking for new messages at startup enabled, but I have noticed
that the mail client does seem to start a little faster, anyway.
It's nice to see that Seamonkey is behaving a lot better (and that I
don't have to go through all the effort of rebuilding the profile by hand).
Smith
My setting is that i did not set an auto-checking for the news. Same
setting for the mail.

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