Tao Effect Forums

Has anyone noticed Thunderbird slowing down a lot once under Espionage? Scrolling the folder pane is now jerky, instead of the smoothness without encryption enabled.

Mike

I saw the same thing with Postbox, so I ended up removing it from Espionage control...

Steve

It's my understanding that Thunderbird and Postbox do share some of the same code (as I believe Postbox is an offshoot of Thunderbird), so that might in fact be the situation. I don't use either on a daily basis so I can't confirm this, but we've tested both to ensure that they work with Espionage.

I use Apple's Mail instead, and at least with that, I did not notice a slowdown after encryption. Though they are still fairly expensive, if you have the cash to spare I highly recommend getting a solid-state drive. It will speed everything up (night and day).

I'm testing Postbox and it was working fine until I encrypted it with Espionage. Now that Postbox is encrypted, it is slowing down to the point that makes Postbox unusable. I cannot use Espionage with Postbox, this is likely the same issue others encountered with Thunderbird.

FYI, I've contacted the Postbox support for this performance issue between Postbox and Espionage, this looks to be the same issue for Thunderbird I think. Here is their response:

---start---
Hi,

Postbox is not compatible with Espionage. Running Postbox on an encrypted profile folder will cause Postbox to be very slow as the disk IO becomes very slow on the system. We don't recommend this.

Cheers,

-Scott
---end---

Therefore, I think the Postbox template in Espionage should be removed, if the Postbox team confirms that it is not compatible with Espionage.

Hi Nicolas,

Thank you for sharing the email from Postbox. We’ll investigate into this.

My understanding is that it may be related to the mail indexing, both encryption and mail indexing combined can slow down the overall system performance.

I have an SSD and I have noticed no performance slowdown with Sparrow, so it is likely that the slower the hard drive, the more noticeable the performance degradation is with Espionage.

If we find that it is not compatible, we’ll consider the request to remove it.

Thank you once again for your help.

Hi Nicolas,

I apologize about that, I was focusing too much on the email part and not the overall post.

That is definitely interesting, we can eliminate that as the cause. I have just tried Espionage with Postbox Express, no issues there.

If you still have Postbox with Espionage; please run a diagnostics report for us after running PostBox for a few minutes, so that we can see what’s going on in the background. You can download our diagnostics tool from here:
http://www.taoeffect.com/other/TEDiagnosticTool.app.zip

In the Diagnostic tool, when it ask for the description of the problem, add “Forum: Thunderbird slows under Espionage”, so that we can connect the dots.

I ran the diagnostic tool as requested and I've submitted the report. Please let me know what's the outcome.

Regards
Nicolas