[Bug 984801] [NEW] Thunderbird 11 has stupidly high idle CPU usage

[Paul Crawford]

Public bug reported:

Running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 32-bit and today I got the upgrade from
Thunderbird 3.6.X to 11.0.1 and noticed it is using a stupid amount of
CPU time when apparently idle. On my quad-core AMD machine it is taking
typically 30-50% CPU when doing nothing, and this is much the same when
minimised, as shown by 'top'

top - 12:50:00 up  1:59,  4 users,  load average: 1.27, 0.99, 1.03
Tasks: 230 total,   3 running, 226 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 12.2%us,  1.4%sy,  0.0%ni, 82.5%id,  3.9%wa,  0.1%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   2706608k total,  2621568k used,    85040k free,   148192k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,  1612160k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                             
20049 paul      20   0  478m 157m  33m R   46  6.0   0:57.14 thunderbird-bin                                                                                                     
19759 paul      20   0  270m 195m  18m S    4  7.4   1:07.00 opera                                                                                                               
 3918 paul      20   0  165m  24m  12m S    1  0.9   1:25.70 chromium-browse                                                                                                     
19215 paul      20   0  2652 1340  984 S    1  0.0   0:21.85 htop                                                                                                                
 1317 root      20   0  152m  98m  13m S    1  3.7   8:20.29 Xorg                                                                                                                
 4422 paul      20   0 49096  13m 9.8m S    0  0.5   1:22.72 gnome-terminal                                                                                                      
20165 paul      20   0  2544 1272  912 R    0  0.0   0:00.06 top                                                                                                                 
    1 root      20   0  2808 1664 1168 S    0  0.1   0:00.56 init                                                                                                                
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd                                                                                                            
    3 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.11 migration/0  

This is APPALLING for anyone on a laptop where power consumption (and
hence battery life) is directly related to CPU use!

What is Thunderbird doing with all of the CPU cycles?

I tried running it in safe mode, and have already disabled any plugins
but to no improvement. I also tried running it via strace and it spews
out a lot of system calls even when idle, most oddly are blocks like
this:

clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {6787, 22357603}) = 0
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {6787, 22435200}) = 0
gettimeofday({1334749406, 311330}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1334749406, 311537}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1334749406, 311670}, NULL) = 0
futex(0xb75eb5c8, FUTEX_WAKE_OP_PRIVATE, 1, 1, 0xb75eb5c4, {FUTEX_OP_SET, 0, FUTEX_OP_CMP_GT, 1}) = 1
open("/home/paul/.thunderbird/3c38dt95.default/session.json", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_LARGEFILE, 0664) = 56
write(56, "{\"rev\":0,\"windows\":[{\"type\":\"3pa"..., 396) = 396
close(56)                               = 0
gettimeofday({1334749406, 314673}, NULL) = 0
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {6787, 26165961}) = 0
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {6787, 26256350}) = 0
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {6787, 26329526}) = 0
gettimeofday({1334749406, 315949}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1334749406, 316354}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1334749406, 316908}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1334749406, 317088}, NULL) = 0

Notice it is calling gettimeofday() every 100us or so! Looks like
someone should be using usleep() or similar time-wasting methods when
nothing is happening :(

** Affects: thunderbird (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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Title:
  Thunderbird 11 has stupidly high idle CPU usage

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