Thunderbird (and now Firefox) intermittently causing high CPU load
I'm on Leap 15.3. Held off the update from Thunderbird 78esr to 91esr for quite a long time because I'd read of one or two issues and knew it might be best to wait a while. Now, let me state that I've been using Thunderbird since pre-1.0 days about twenty years ago. It's always been rock solid stable, sometimes a bit old and clunky but absolutely reliable, more so than just about any other software I use. I also understand that open source developers don't get enthused by criticism and they give their free time and energy and we should all do our best to show appreciation and be constructive in our conversations and hug trees. With that said, all current Thunderbird developers must die! Okay, I'll back off a bit. After twenty years of rock solid stability I upgraded to 91esr and have run into a catalogue of irritations, some of which I should have actually catalogued because I've now forgotten for a moment what they are, but I'm sure they'll come back to haunt me some more. In the v91 release notes I see lots of happy-clapping for spangly new features that are of no relevance to me. I just want the continued stability. Somebody already remarked on here some time ago that scrolling in the TB message preview pane is now horked. I either have to click or move the mouse about erratically in the pane to get it to scroll. Sometimes it scrolls immediately, other times not, and seems worse when there's images in the mail but no consistency or logic to it. Tried turning on hardware acceleration and for an hour or so thought that had cured it, only for the problem to return many times since. One or two other smaller annoyances I'll just have to put up with for the time being, but I'd like to know if anybody else has witnessed high CPU usage, specifically in Thunderbird 91esr on Leap 15.3? I wondered if it was continually reindexing my twenty years' archive of folders, and at first it seemed to do it fairly routinely once a day in early evening. But then it became more frequent, and now it spins up several times a day. This laptop has been ultra quiet for three years. 8 cores, 32gb of RAM, all of which I barely use. Bought it secondhand-like-new and it's way overspec'd for the mostly mundane tasks I require of it. Only very rarely does a CPU intensive task spin up the fan and make any noise noticeable, briefly. But now Thunderbird is doing this consistently. At this rate, it's going to wipe two years off the lifetime of this machine. I do NOT have the global search and indexer feature enabled. I tried deselecting and reselecting it as OFF just to make sure. If I look in Plasma's System Activity when the high load occurs, I see Thunderbird showing typically between 6 and 22% CPU load whilst most other processes are rarely pushing more than 1 or 2%. There may be subprocesses amongst the bazillion other kworker and whatever garbage things further down the list, but I can't pick out anything for sure. Nothing that nudges more than a percent or two. It's also not the Compact Folders process, because I still only do that manually after a prompt. It just prompted me for the first time in a long while (I have it set to only act with over ~200mb wasted space), and after that ran for a few seconds, my system just went into some kind of hyperdrive like never before witnessed, whilst Baloo reindexed for a few minutes and half the neighbourhood lost power to the centrale nucléaire whilst Mr Linux plays with his email client. And now Firefox has decided to join in the fun and games. Again, the standard latest ESR version for 15.3. Most particularly when I start playing anything in YouTube, but not uniquely that. System Activity usually shows a process 'RDD' consuming one core, and my fan starts going into warp speed again. Never happened before this last week or two. In both Thunderbird and Firefox I've turned off all studies, data collection, error reporting and whatnot to eliminate that. It could be that others have these symptoms but don't notice on their desktop fanless or soundproofed machines. What could be the cause? No I haven't yet filed any bug reports. I'm unsure if it could be openSUSE-specific, perhaps some other dependency like a graphics update that has nothing to do with Mozilla. Too many vague things to know where to even start. And no I haven't tried creating a blank profile because I can be almost certain nothing will go goofy in such an empty profile, and I don't want the inconvenience of setting up and receiving pop mail in a fresh instance and then having to merge it all back into my main mail at a later date. gumb
On 5/15/22 18:13, gumb wrote:
I'm on Leap 15.3. Held off the update from Thunderbird 78esr to 91esr for quite a long time because I'd read of one or two issues and knew it might be best to wait a while.
Now, let me state that I've been using Thunderbird since pre-1.0 days about twenty years ago. It's always been rock solid stable, sometimes a bit old and clunky but absolutely reliable, more so than just about any other software I use. I also understand that open source developers don't get enthused by criticism and they give their free time and energy and we should all do our best to show appreciation and be constructive in our conversations and hug trees.
With that said, all current Thunderbird developers must die!
Okay, I'll back off a bit. After twenty years of rock solid stability I upgraded to 91esr and have run into a catalogue of irritations, some of which I should have actually catalogued because I've now forgotten for a moment what they are, but I'm sure they'll come back to haunt me some more. In the v91 release notes I see lots of happy-clapping for spangly new features that are of no relevance to me. I just want the continued stability.
Somebody already remarked on here some time ago that scrolling in the TB message preview pane is now horked. I either have to click or move the mouse about erratically in the pane to get it to scroll. Sometimes it scrolls immediately, other times not, and seems worse when there's images in the mail but no consistency or logic to it. Tried turning on hardware acceleration and for an hour or so thought that had cured it, only for the problem to return many times since.
One or two other smaller annoyances I'll just have to put up with for the time being, but I'd like to know if anybody else has witnessed high CPU usage, specifically in Thunderbird 91esr on Leap 15.3? I wondered if it was continually reindexing my twenty years' archive of folders, and at first it seemed to do it fairly routinely once a day in early evening. But then it became more frequent, and now it spins up several times a day. This laptop has been ultra quiet for three years. 8 cores, 32gb of RAM, all of which I barely use. Bought it secondhand-like-new and it's way overspec'd for the mostly mundane tasks I require of it. Only very rarely does a CPU intensive task spin up the fan and make any noise noticeable, briefly. But now Thunderbird is doing this consistently. At this rate, it's going to wipe two years off the lifetime of this machine.
I do NOT have the global search and indexer feature enabled. I tried deselecting and reselecting it as OFF just to make sure. If I look in Plasma's System Activity when the high load occurs, I see Thunderbird showing typically between 6 and 22% CPU load whilst most other processes are rarely pushing more than 1 or 2%. There may be subprocesses amongst the bazillion other kworker and whatever garbage things further down the list, but I can't pick out anything for sure. Nothing that nudges more than a percent or two.
It's also not the Compact Folders process, because I still only do that manually after a prompt. It just prompted me for the first time in a long while (I have it set to only act with over ~200mb wasted space), and after that ran for a few seconds, my system just went into some kind of hyperdrive like never before witnessed, whilst Baloo reindexed for a few minutes and half the neighbourhood lost power to the centrale nucléaire whilst Mr Linux plays with his email client.
And now Firefox has decided to join in the fun and games. Again, the standard latest ESR version for 15.3. Most particularly when I start playing anything in YouTube, but not uniquely that. System Activity usually shows a process 'RDD' consuming one core, and my fan starts going into warp speed again. Never happened before this last week or two. In both Thunderbird and Firefox I've turned off all studies, data collection, error reporting and whatnot to eliminate that.
It could be that others have these symptoms but don't notice on their desktop fanless or soundproofed machines. What could be the cause?
No I haven't yet filed any bug reports. I'm unsure if it could be openSUSE-specific, perhaps some other dependency like a graphics update that has nothing to do with Mozilla. Too many vague things to know where to even start. And no I haven't tried creating a blank profile because I can be almost certain nothing will go goofy in such an empty profile, and I don't want the inconvenience of setting up and receiving pop mail in a fresh instance and then having to merge it all back into my main mail at a later date.
gumb
91esr??? If you mean the SLE version, the latest stock is 91.8.0-150200.8.65.1 from the SLE Update repo. This version of TB is perfectly stable on my stock 15.3 box, and I have it heavily loaded up with accounts/folders/filters/storage. I do get a KDE slow-down at start (from tracker) but that normalizes in a few minutes, and I don't use baloo. But indexers would slow down everything, not just TB. --dg Leap 15.3/Plasma 5.18.6/Frameworks 5.76.0/Kernel 5.13.8
On 16/05/2022 01:52, DennisG wrote:
91esr??? If you mean the SLE version, the latest stock is 91.8.0-150200.8.65.1 from the SLE Update repo.
No need to specify the minor version, I say 91esr because the issue is consistent across all 91.x versions.
This version of TB is perfectly stable on my stock 15.3 box, and I have it heavily loaded up with accounts/folders/filters/storage.
I do get a KDE slow-down at start (from tracker) but that normalizes in a few minutes, and I don't use baloo. But indexers would slow down everything, not just TB.
Baloo only kicks in after a Compact Folders operation, because it sees that the index file has been touched. And that only occurs once every few weeks or so. The other indexing I refer to is Thunderbird's own internal Global Search and Indexer. But as I stated, I've always had that off so I don't understand what exactly it is doing. Of course, after weeks observing these high CPU load symptoms, as soon as I finally posted about it here there's now been no further symptoms for the last week, so nothing more I can remark upon. Hoping it stays like that, but it leaves it as a mystery I'll never get to the bottom of. Maybe my posting here alerted the secret services to back off infiltrating my system because I'd noticed they were up to something =) gumb
On 5/21/22 06:29, gumb wrote:
No need to specify the minor version, I say 91esr because the issue is consistent across all 91.x versions.
This version of TB is perfectly stable on my stock 15.3 box, and I have it heavily loaded up with accounts/folders/filters/storage.
I do get a KDE slow-down at start (from tracker) but that normalizes in a few minutes, and I don't use baloo. But indexers would slow down everything, not just TB.
It's not the global indexing either. I turned it off and deleted: global-messages-db.sqlite No change. Thunderbird is still #1 in top consistently. I can understand when it is checking messages to wake up and take some additional CPU, but it is 24/7 taking 2-5% of CPU. I've used Tbird since 2001 (or earlier) and I've never seen it continually demand CPU before. I have no problem with Firefox (as long as it's not left open on a particularly chatty .js page causing Web Content to wake up). For the past 10 hours Firefox has bounced between 0.00% and 0.331% which that seems normal. While writing this message, Tbird "saved draft" and CPU use shot to 20%. Just typing this message is burning 5% CPU (on an older i7 2.7GHz box) Will strace Tbird next to see what shows up. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
On 5/31/22 14:58, David C. Rankin wrote:
On 5/21/22 06:29, gumb wrote:
No need to specify the minor version, I say 91esr because the issue is consistent across all 91.x versions.
This version of TB is perfectly stable on my stock 15.3 box, and I have it heavily loaded up with accounts/folders/filters/storage.
I do get a KDE slow-down at start (from tracker) but that normalizes in a few minutes, and I don't use baloo. But indexers would slow down everything, not just TB.
<snip>
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. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
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
On 5/31/22 17:10, gumb wrote:
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)
<<snip>>
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.
<snip>
Bug opened with Mozilla, feel free to add supporting details if you have them: Tbird 91esr Continual High CPU Usage - EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772023 -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
On 01/06/2022 01:34, David C. Rankin wrote:
Bug opened with Mozilla, feel free to add supporting details if you have them:
Tbird 91esr Continual High CPU Usage - EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772023
I can't understand if I'm witnessing two entirely different issues or two that are somehow related. It's just strange that both have started around the same time, a few weeks ago, and both only occur with Mozilla software. If Thunderbird was causing the majority of the grief before, it seems most of my issues are now with Firefox, specifically when using YouTube. I found a related bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1560728 That then links to another: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1539043 Both of those date back two of three years, however, and I didn't start seeing this problem until recently, always keeping my 15.3 system up-to-date with latest Firefox ESR. Apparently the AV1 video codec is the culprit, and the latter report contains a comment saying to go into YouTube settings and select AV1 only for lower resolution videos, leaving VP9 for HD and higher resolutions. I've done that, but it doesn't really seem to have had any effect. The fan spins up wildly on every video I try to view. If I download the HD video and watch in Dragon Player or VLC the PC is completely silent. Almost nothing else ever spins up the CPU to noisy level on this machine. gumb
On 16/05/2022 00.13, gumb wrote:
I'm on Leap 15.3. Held off the update from Thunderbird 78esr to 91esr for quite a long time because I'd read of one or two issues and knew it might be best to wait a while.
...
It could be that others have these symptoms but don't notice on their desktop fanless or soundproofed machines. What could be the cause?
I have not noticed it being more cpu hungry than before. But sometimes it seems stuck at high load, so I kill and restart it. One difference is that instead of letting Th store mail on its own, I use a local dovecot server, and Thunderbird sees it via imap. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from openSUSE 15.3 (Legolas))
participants (5)
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Carlos E. R. -
David C. Rankin -
David C. Rankin -
DennisG -
gumb