thunderbird pegs and hogs hard drive disc io

[Colin Law]

On 15 March 2015 at 08:07, thufir <hawat.thufir at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Mar 2015 20:53:42 +0000, Colin Law wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>
> free -h shows:
>
> Mem:          1.9G       1.6G       314M
>

You have only shown half of the details, one needs all the numbers to
understand what is happening, including the swap information.  The
critical thing is what does it show when it starts thrashing?  Using
top might be better as you might also learn something from the
processes at the head of the list.

Colin