On 31/05/2022 23:22, David C. Rankin wrote:
Will strace Tbird next to see what shows up.
Thunderbird runs two processes now:
$ ps axf | grep bird 15520 ? Sl 16:48 \_ /usr/lib64/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin 15585 ? Z 0:00 | \_ [thunderbird-bin] <defunct> 15590 ? Sl 0:00 | \_ /usr/lib64/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin -contentproc -childID 1 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 1 -prefMapSize 280054 -jsInit 285716 -parentBuildID 20220502180952 -appdir /usr/lib64/thunderbird 15520 tab
The second seems to be some web-browser process, likely for displaying html messages or web-pages in the message window. I have thunderbird running on a separate desktop where it is the only app running, so while strace was occurring, I was on another desktop ensuring that thunderbird received no input or focus.
The problem is both processes are extremely active, a large majority of the entries are:
recvmsg(4, {msg_namelen=0}, 0) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
I took a strace of each process, and the parent process generated over 5M of output is just a few seconds. The child process a little over 100K of output, e.g.
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5159860 May 31 15:14 20220531-151346-thunderbird-err.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 117214 May 31 15:56 20220531-155626-thunderbird-err.log
I'm no expert in deciphering the strance output. I know what each output is telling me, but not what it means in the overall operation of thunderbird at any particular moment. But the overarching takeaway is there are a huge number of recvmsg calls where the resource is unavailable causing tbird to simply sit there spinning it's wheels.
I don't know if this is normal thread blocking taking place, a deadlock, or some other cause, but it certainly looks suspicious.
This strace output is all beyond my knowledge, I can't really offer any insight there. After another few days without noticeable spin-ups, the fan kicked in again just now when I was watching a YouTube video, but it was Thunderbird that had the CPU activity. I was seeing this a lot a week or so ago. That would seem ridiculous that the two things could be related, aside from both Firefox and Thunderbird sharing certain Mozilla dependencies. Maybe it's not that Tbird has any knowledge of what I'm doing in the browser, rather that when watching a video I'm sat back for a while not using the keyboard or mouse, and Tbird considers that time as idle, so starts fiddling about and launching some (probably corrupted) process. gumb