I have just upgraded to thunderbird 3 and have found it to be very sluggish in all respects.
I am running it on a Corsair 16gb Flash Voyager GT drive which is about as fast as a usb flash drive comes.
I have found that switching off Global Search & Indexer fixes the issue, and i think even makes it faster than tbird 2!
Only thing is that it also switches off one of the fantastic new features of Tbird 3
Has anyone else come up with a better solution? My mail folder is approx 1gb.
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The initial indexing is slow if you have a large inbox. It will be slow on some drives.
16gb drives in general are ALL slow when compared to 2gb and 4gb drives when it comes to individual small writes. The rated speeds of drives don't mean anything in relation to an app like TB3 since they rate reading and writing individual BIG files (i.e. ideal circumstances).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Hello John
t bird had said it had finished indexing.
the usb key is as fast in day to day use, or faster than my old 4gb flash voyager gt. i tried and wasted quite a bit of money on so called fast flash drivers before purchasing another corsair gt drive.
believe me, they are a very good fast usb flash drive.
i still suspect something is not quite right with either my setup of thunderbird or indexing.
i do have a lot of folders in my filing folder, i wonder if this is the cause of the problem??
will be interesting to see what others find.
particularly on XP. I am one of those who run those things also on w2k and as most other things from the flash stick, also there TBP runs much faster then on XP.
This would confirm the issue with small files handling, which is much faster on w2k apparently then on XP.
So far TBP3 on XP, was not so big fun, returned for the moment back to 2023.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
My 16GB JD Firefly (which sadly is on its way out--apparently the USB connector is coming loose) was actually pretty good with small writes. I never had a complaint with that drive, unlike, say, the many SanDisk Cruzers I've had, which are absolutely atrocious with incremental and small-file writes. I'm hoping the new 32GB DT112 I just ordered will be as nice as the Firefly.
Maybe try a new flash drive
OCZ Throttle is fast as hell, 32MB/s all the time in USB and 90MB/s in eSata
No pauses at all, ever.
I lost my MBR twice but I found if I formatted it as 16G instead of 32 it was more stable. Might have something to do with the 4g FreeOTFE file. OCZ said my disk was defective and are replacing it though (even though I can't see it is actually defective.)
I had a Sandisk for a week and that is now an eBoostr read cache on the back of the PC because the write speed was so bad that FF and TB would pause for 3 seconds every few seconds.
p.s. I have 11+ years worth of email and love the new indexing. (one thing you can do is after it indexes find all mail > 100kb (1000kb did not seem to work) and sort by size and start a careful culling. This will probably be good for the drive in the long run as it reduces the size of the mailfolder files)
If it's a 32GB drive and you have to format it as 16GB to make it stable, then that sounds plenty defective to me.
Also how are you using a flash drive with ESATA? They're USB devices...
It is a usb/eSata drive. I use usb at home, at work I plug it into a spare sata port using and eSata extension cable.
I only actually use 4G and had 2 backups so it is no sweat, it has not failed since partitioning smaller and this also increases its life. (Interestingly it did fail again when I partitioned it and allocated the partition to the end of the drive.) I think I was just unlucky. I am doing a swap in a few months when the shop gets a new bunch.
Sounds like the second half of the drive is bad (perhaps it has two flash chips and the second is defective). My guess is that the drive doesn't have wear leveling, so it's always the same spot on the drive that'll cause issues. Which in your case seems to be a good thing.
Defragment drive + disable indexing worked for me.
seems to be one of the real new features, or at least it will be probably needed for all those search features which arre so much advertized as new functions. It will work probably no doubt, but then one can stick with the version 2 as well.
And defragg the flash drive (:-)))?), well it is other story, I dont want start an other endless discussion on that subject.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
To make a long story short, you don't defragment a flash drive because:
1) Seek time on flash is near instantaneous, therefore defragmenting it won't make it any faster, and...
2) Flash memory can only handle a finite number of writes and defragmenting it will do a lot of writing