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Thunderbird freezes for seconds at a time many times a day

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My platform is CentOS 7.2, Thunderbird 38.5.0.

Thunderbird generally works pretty well for me, but I find that it will suddenly freeze for several seconds at a time, many times a day. This of course happens while I'm entering the content for a message. It just completely stops taking any input for several seconds, and then comes back.

If it matters, I recently cleaned out thousands of old messages. I have no idea whether that's relevant. I did notice some old articles that talked about issues like this, but the troubleshooting instructions didn't appear to match my version of Thunderbird.

My platform is CentOS 7.2, Thunderbird 38.5.0. Thunderbird generally works pretty well for me, but I find that it will suddenly freeze for several seconds at a time, many times a day. This of course happens while I'm entering the content for a message. It just completely stops taking any input for several seconds, and then comes back. If it matters, I recently cleaned out thousands of old messages. I have no idea whether that's relevant. I did notice some old articles that talked about issues like this, but the troubleshooting instructions didn't appear to match my version of Thunderbird.

All Replies (4)

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Hi dkarr - it's rare that we see a centos user here. But it's good to see. :)

Do you have the lightning addon enabled for calendar capabilities?

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(I noticed that the email I received from this is somewhat useless. There is no "view this in web site", so I had to navigate manually to it so I could send a reply to this.)

Yeah, the CentOS thing was probably somewhat misguided. I probably would have had fewer struggles if I imaged it with Ubuntu. I will still press on, however.

Yes, I do have Lightning enabled. I don't really use the calendaring feature, so I suppose I could disable that if that's a potential performance problem.

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dkarr said

(I noticed that the email I received from this is somewhat useless. There is no "view this in web site", so I had to navigate manually to it so I could send a reply to this.)

If you have View | Message body as | original html then ou should see a structured email like the screen shot I attached

dkarr said

Yes, I do have Lightning enabled. I don't really use the calendaring feature, so I suppose I could disable that if that's a potential performance problem.

Start with removing it. Does that help?

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Wayne Mery said

dkarr said
(I noticed that the email I received from this is somewhat useless. There is no "view this in web site", so I had to navigate manually to it so I could send a reply to this.)

If you have View | Message body as | original html then ou should see a structured email like the screen shot I attached

It's already set that way. I don't see the point of that. The email comes from a "noreply" email, and there is no "view in web browser" link, so the only way I can reply to your reply is to manually go to my web browser, navigate to this site, and find the posting.

dkarr said
Yes, I do have Lightning enabled. I don't really use the calendaring feature, so I suppose I could disable that if that's a potential performance problem.

Start with removing it. Does that help?

I'll disable it, but of course it will take a while before I'll be able to tell whether it makes a difference.

(Even right after restarting I think it probably doesn't make a difference. It froze for a couple of seconds twice in the first minute or so.)