I have been using Thunderbird on W7 with my mail folder and profile stored in AFS. Performance was not great but acceptable until recently.
The main problem appears to be Thunderbird's handing of Copy, Move and Delete (Copy to Trash) operations as it buffers the input but writes one output line at a time. Base 64 encode attachments tend to have a line length of 74 or 78 bytes, and thus a 3.8MB file may require 50,000 writes. And this can take more then 60 seconds and the TB client shows "(Not Responding)" on the title bar. I have submitted a suggested 2 line patch for Thunderbird 13.0.1 to buffer the writes in an 8K buffer, and cut the delete time from more then 60 seconds to less then 2 seconds. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769346 Mozilla has "fixed" many performance bugs like this, including using buffering, but these problems keep coming back, and are back in TB 12.0, 13.0 and 13.0.1. While trying to figure out why performance was getting worse, I kept upgrading TB and OpenAFS clients on Windows 7 and was running TB 12.0 and OpenAFS 1.7.15 with performance getting worse rather then better. The OpenAFS Change log says: Since 1.7.1100 (1.7.11) * Treat all cached writes as write-through This appears to have complicated the matter, and while trying to figure what was going on, I backed off to 1.7.1000, prior to that change. I will be on vacation next week, waiting to hear if anyone at Mozilla reads the bug report, or if there is some changes to OpenAFS that could improve handing of small writes. I expect to work on the patch some more in a few weeks, and go back to OpenAFS 1.7.1500 as it appears to fix some other problems that the 1.7.1000 has. -- Douglas E. Engert <[email protected]> Argonne National Laboratory 9700 South Cass Avenue Argonne, Illinois 60439 (630) 252-5444 _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-devel
