is anybody else having problems with thunderbird sucking up too much memory?? in my case, it has used as much as 50mb.

2/2/2006 11:52:19 PM

50MB? eh, not bad. I don't know if that constitutes a memory leak. If you leave TB open overnight, for example, does the memory usage continuously creep up by morning?

How many messages do you have in your inbox? Thunderbird uses the mBox format for storing mail, which basically creates one file for each folder that stores the messages. As such, if the folder gets big, the entire file has to be loaded into memory when viewing any message inside it, so if you're switching back and forth between several large folders, then you'll use a lot of memory.

One way to reduce the folder size is to be sure to "compact folder" occasionally. When you delete a message from a folder, the message isn't actually deleted from the associated mBox folder file - it's just marked as deleted, so it doesn't show up in the folder view (this can come in handy if, for example, you accidentally delete a message, and it's no longer in your Deleted Items folder. You can open up the mBox file in a text editor and search for the message, then mark it as 'new' and it will show back up in the folder). Therefore, if you receive a large attachment or something and delete the message, it still stays in the mBox file. So if you right-click on any folder in the folder view and select "compact this folder", it will parse the mBox file and remove any deleted messages.

You can check out the size of the folders at
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Thunderbird\Profiles\<profile>\Mail\<account>

And of course, if you keep your mail organized into smaller folders that should help. So if your Inbox is kept relatively empty and you move message to subfolders, those subfolder mBox files won't be loaded into memory until you access the folder.

2/3/2006 3:38:58 AM

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/memory_leak.html

2/3/2006 7:30:39 AM