thunderbird pegs and hogs hard drive disc io

[Colin Law]

On 14 March 2015 at 20:06, thufir <hawat.thufir at gmail.com> wrote:
> I switched pc's, so Thunderbird has to download n e-mails for imap
> archive, and this both takes time and hogs resources.  Ok, that's fine.
>
> However, it renders this pc unusable to the point where I left it for an
> hour, still the hard drive was pegged to the point where the console
> wouldn't respond, I had to use REISUB.  Also, the disc was under so much
> usage that it was a bit alarming.
>
> I want thunderbird to download archives, I have it set to just archive
> the last few days, but downloads headers.  How can I limit this?
>
> Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
>
> iotop showed thundebird, and, oddly, firefox -- both at 99% or so of
> resources.  I put it almost entirely down to thunderbird.
>
> I've rebooted, and am going to go through tbird to make sure it's not
> trying to archive everything, but this seems a bit unprecedented.  Any
> pointers/logs to look at/etc?

How much RAM have you got and how much cache and how much (if any)
cache is in use (top will show you that)?  What you have described
sounds like the classic symptom of disk thrashing due to running out
of RAM and having to use the cache.

Colin