Thunderbird slows under Espionage

Started by mdisabato, December 27, 2010, 05:48:00 PM

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mdisabato

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

mayersj1

#1
I saw the same thing with Postbox, so I ended up removing it from Espionage control...

Steve

greg

#2
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).
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nwi

#3
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.

nwi

#4
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.

mike

#5
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.
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nwi

#6
Quote from: "mike"Hi Scott,

Thank you for sharing the email from Thunderbird. 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.

I'm nwi (Nicolas), not Scott ;-)
Scott is the engineer from Postbox who responded to me.

I have personally tested Postbox with Espionage on my MacBook Pro with an OWC SSD drive and I have noticed this performance issue so much that I could not use Postbox at all. Therefore, SSD drive does not improve anything on my side.

Regards
Nicolas

mike

#7
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.
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nwi

#8
I ran the diagnostic tool as requested and I've submitted the report. Please let me know what's the outcome.

Regards
Nicolas

mike

#9
Quote from: "nwi"I ran the diagnostic tool as requested and I've submitted the report. Please let me know what's the outcome.

Regards
Nicolas
Hi Nicolas, I received your report and responded to you over email. I did see something wrong but it may not be related to this issue at all, we're still looking into this situation for you.
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nwi

#10
Hi Mike,

I've seen your response and proceeded with the steps to re-install iSpy, nevertheless as you suspected, this has not solved the performance issue with Postbox.

Regards
Nicolas

mike

#11
Hi Nicolas,

I responded to your email already. I'll summarize it for everybody here.

We were not able to find any causes behind the slowdown, it doesn't mean it is not there for certain users who may have a large mailbox or undergoing some tasks in Postbox/Thunderbird such as creating an index or a cache file. Our tests shows no major performance drops with Espionage and Postbox/Thunderbird. It is normal to see *some* drop in performance but it should not be significant. If you notice that Postbox is doing some disk operations, wait for it to complete and then see if it'll speed up over time.

Espionage puts some folders that Postbox/Thunderbird uses in an encrypted file system and it'd be transparent to those apps, it shouldn't slow down the overall performance of those apps in any way unless the apps are doing some inefficient disk I/O operations. This would be applied to other apps like Postbox as well.

There is not much we can do to speed things up for Postbox, the encryption protocols are built into the Mac OS X and it is the same for all apps, it should already be maximized.

If the performance loss is not acceptable after waiting a bit, I'd suggest not using Postbox with Espionage at all.

I'm sorry that I do not have a better answer for you or others who have the same slowdown with Postbox/Thunderbird.
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