I had the same problem, and I overlooked the most simple case - look at the Activity Manager (Tools->Activity Manager) and find out that Thunderbird was synching my complete imap email account with the local machine!
-- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to thunderbird in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/984801 Title: Thunderbird 11 has stupidly high idle CPU usage Status in “thunderbird” package in Ubuntu: Invalid Bug description: 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 :( To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/984801/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
