OK, you've addressed most of the common things.
Rick Collins wrote:
2) Is your computer slow when Seamonkey is closed, and you're
interacting with other applications? If you live in Seamonkey, it's
easy to blame Seamonkey for slowness, when it may be just the symptom of
other things that are causing performance issues.
I switched to SeaMonkey because T-bird was so slow with delays when
doing simple things like moving the cursor and seeing the
highlighting stop, inability to select anything, essentially the user
interface freezes. At times it would take minutes for it to return.
SeaMonkey does the same sorts of things, but it returns a lot more
quickly.
The rest of my machine is pretty smooth with few delays. Monitoring
the state of the computer with Task Manager shows nothing hogging
*any* resource that would slow SeaMonkey.
OK, that would seem to rule out other things.
One thing that I've noticed is that with Mozilla things, sometimes
hang-ups seem to be script-related, and stuff that frequently doesn't
show up in the task manger. I occasionally have hangs and pauses, and
they're annoying, and no obvious source. One thing I have seen is that
if I have Seamonkey open when I hibernate, and then I resume from
hibernation, it often takes several minutes before things settle enough
that I can use the machine again. And at least some of the time, I get
script timeout warnings from Lightning. I'm almost to the point of
preferring a full shutdown and restart to using hibernation.
There's a lot of things that could be happening, such as background AV
scanning, other applications that are updating, etc.
These things would show up in Task Manager. When I bring my machine
out of hibernate there is a malware program that saturates the disk for
a minute or three. I can see that happen and the entire machine is
affected. So I can't understand how anything like this would sap a
single application.
Stuff outside of Seamonkey, yes. However, as noted above, I've seen
evidence of scripts hanging, but not where they're obviously consuming
memory or CPU. For what it's worth, beyond the response times I see when
coming out of hibernation, when I'm seeing performance issues, it's
often when the Task Manager reports RAM usage at more than a GB. In
that combination, I generally find a way of restarting Seamonkey,
although I don't like to do that, because I generally don't allow POP
and IMAP connections to keep login credentials, and I flush cookies when
I shut down seamonkey. Although I don't mind having to go through
several authentications at the beginning of the day, it's more of a pain
to do that following a restart.
Adobe notoriously "fat", and includes a lot of low-priority plugins.
Acrobat hasn't been used on this machine ever. I use lightweight PDF viewers
like Sumatra and Foxit.
A good approach. Use Adobe only if there's a specific need for it. But
in any case, it looks like you don't have a lot of auto-started stuff
consuming memory.
3) Hardware can be a problem, too. The most common area of question is
RAM -- if you're running a machine with 4 GB of RAM, and you typically
use more than that, then you're going to be doing a lot of memory
swapping to hard disk, and you'll notice that in performance.
Same thing with this concern. I have 16 GB of RAM. If the RAM would
the problem is manifests by swapping to the hard drive saturating the
drive. I see neither the drive being saturated nor the memory being
used up. Right now the RAM usage is 12.4 GB.
12.4 G is a lot of use, but if you have 16, you're not RAM-constrained.
I also find slowness issues with hard drives:
- Check your disk usage. If your hard drive is more than 50% capacity,
it will be slower than if you have less.
Under Windows 8 a defragging application runs automatically. Hard
drive congestion is only a factor if a lot of accesses are being made
to the hard drive. I see light activity and there is no special
reason why the SeaMonkey apps would be more subject to the delays
than any other apps.
Even Win 7 runs defragging automatically, and it's enough where I rarely
bother to defrag a drive.
However, if your drive is nearly full, you'll notice the the effects a
lot more than you may think, even on a relatively quiet system. Although
your use description indicates that you're not doing much in the way of
memory swapping, Windows does touch the hard disk a lot more than you
think. Actually, any operating system. I have a Linux box that runs as
a single partition (except for /swap) and a while back, I was running at
nearly 80% capacity, and performance for everything was noticeably slow,
enough that it was difficult to use the KDE desktop. When I did some
cleanup (especially discarding virtual machine snapshots), and brought
storage down to about 2/3, performance was noticeably better.
I am using the SeaMonkey browser at the moment to type this and am
seeing delays just in typing that make it hard to use. I can get
half a line ahead of the display. The CPU usage is below 10%, the
disk usage is nearly zero. The delays I see are in the newsreader
and browser as I don't use email.
The common denominator is T-Bird and SeaMonkey (which have much
common code and architecture) as well as the fact that it is seen in
both SeaMonkey apps I use. If there were general problems with my
machine I would expect to see it manifest in other apps.
The one thing that I don't see that you've tried is use of Safe Mode
and/or what happens with a fresh user profile.
I've found that a lot of times, problems tend to be profile related.
Sometimes, there can be a problem that's related to a specific
extension, and sometimes, cruft that's accumulated, especially if the
profile has been in use for many years.
One of the things I do with my own configs (both Seamonkey and Firefox,
on multiple machines) is that I maintain a "bare metal" profile, where
the content is almost entirely default. If Seamonkey isn't behaving
well, I can either restart in Safe Mode, or restart with the bare metal
profile. There are occasions where I've seen a one-off use of Safe Mode
clear problems (without further tinkering), and I've also seen occasions
where the bare metal profile performs better than safe mode.
One of the things that I did about a year ago was to move all my data to
a new profile, and I've seen modestly improved performance.
If you're using Seamonkey only as a browser, it's pretty easy to
transition to a new profile -- typically all you have to move is your
bookmarks, and possibly your passwords store. For my transition, I ran
for a while just the browser in the new profile, and I was pleased with
the results there.
For Seamonkey, it's a little harder to transition your mail, and I found
the new profile to be slower after I moved my mail data.
Anyway, there's a little more perspective.
Smith
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