Thunderbird Beta "Not responding" and freezes on Windows [caused by Windows Defender]

You have wrote that original windows users problem is resolved. However, it remains unclear what is meant by this? Is it resolved by TB update or what?
The freezing problem still exists.
So what are the steps I need to take to resolve this issue?

Hi,

After updating to 71.0b1 (32-bit) on Windows 10 (Home), a similar problem started to manifest itself (it wasn’t present in the previous version).

The problem appears when trying to introduce an email address in the “To:” field when writing a new email or responding to one. The CPU usage jumps to about 25% (on a relatively old Core i3, not sure this is relevant) and the entire program freezes for 10 to 30 seconds, sometimes longer.

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that there are about a dozen email accounts in use with literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of addresses in the address book.

Istvan, what is the total number of contacts in your address books?

Somewhere around 17k addresses.

Still, I don’t think this has anything to do with the size of the address book, considering that the issue didn’t appear until the last update.

Edit: Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that when idle, the CPU usage of Thunderbird is at around 15-16%. When the issue appears, it jumps by at least 10%.

Don’t be fooled - “Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results”. In this case, 71 beta has major changes to address book, which can easily affect performance.

One issue is being examined in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1597394

p.s. your issue isn’t related to Defender, so it should not be posted under this topic. Better to post your own new topic

I was trying to troubleshoot with safe mode on, switching off antivirus, upgrading to latest Thunderbird etc. Finally found something that’s really quite stable. I switched off hardware acceleration. I hope it works for you.

I have been plagued with ‘not responding’ issues for over a year. Tried everything. Removed plug-ins, Hardware acceleration off, reinstall, remove profile lock, Disable search, no aftermarket anti-virus programs, no entries in address book, rebuilt index still hangs all the time. Especially when I empty junk or open an inbox. Only way to get out is to shut down app and restart. Sometimes multiple times before it works.
I have a new Dell computer with i7 9th Gen and plenty of memory. Task Manager shows no issues while TB is hung.
I am ready to kick TB to the curb.

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@dcol So you have been through https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems ?

For me I fixed it by installing a default dictionary. For some reason I had none but it was still trying to check spelling when writing (in options) or my old dictionary got lost. Installed a new one, reloaded, no lockup when I reply and start writing a message.

Can confirm.

Been through every “guide” thrown at me, disabled extensions, settings, blocked AV from it, rebuild MSF, tweaked IMAP settings, different TB versions, different computers.

Thunderbird has just had a terrible performance issue for a few years now with the blame being pointed everywhere but itself.

I’d happily look into an equally featured alternative at this point.

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I’m a regular Thunderbird user from the begining of the project, but it only became my preferred e-mail client when I started use Lightning a long time ago.

I already reported this problem and all tyupe of solutions were gave to me, but none did work, including some of the written here in this post.

The only thing I can suspect that is my problem, is the calendar syncronization from Thunderbird. Because, everytime that Thunderbird freezes, it immediatly after shows the reminders pop-up window.

And… when I’m not using any online calendar at all… I have no performance issues. But… I already told this in the past, but nothing changed.

I’ve already tried to put Thunderbird proccess priority to Real-Time, but the behavior doesn’t get even better.

Would be very very nice to have a solution for this loooooooong time problem, reported over and over and over. Just google for it and there are several complaints.

There are 2 deffects that thunderbird didn’t solve that makes me always try new e-mail clients (ordered by loss of productivity):

  1. Freezes all the time. It’s cyclic, like something that have to happen from period to period;
  2. ICS not being processed by Lightning;

If there was none of these issues, I’d never consider using or testing a different solution.

Issue is still there

Issue still occurring. Thunderbird continually freezing and not responding while trying to use. IE writing emails. Will this issue ever be resolved? It is annoying and time consuming.

I use my Windows 10 laptop infrequently and haven’t seen a problem since cleaning out some unused apps, doing a disk optimization, then deciding to do a complete Windows 10 refresh.

I don’t like it, but of course that adding thunderbird and thunderbird.exe as exclusion process solves the issue.

This solution seems obvious to me, but still nobody has mention it in this thread… So use it at your own risk :slight_smile:

Thank you for posting.

Actually antivirus software is mentioned several times at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems

Yeah… still, for some reason the suggestion to add the explicit exclusión was missing in this thread. And also the link you posted was missing as a reference. Thank you for posting it.