Mon, 19 Apr 2010

Indexing in Thunderbird 3...

...is a pile of epic fail (on Linux at least.) I like the idea of full-text searching - but I also like my laptop to not have the CPU at melting temperature all the time and the fans running at full speed as thunderbird burns through CPU indexing what I can only assume are the same messages over and over and over again. I also like to start blog posts with a hearty generalisation, even if the behaviour is something relatively specific to my situation - it grabs the reader's attention and makes sure they read the remainder of the article ;-)

Normal behaviour, and better use of your CPU can be restored by disabling full text search / indexing. You can do this by setting the advanced configuration option mailnews.database.global.indexer.enabled to false, or as this has obviously become a big enough problem for enough people, the Edit | Preferences | General tab now has a checkbox marked Enable Global Search and Indexer. Unchecking this will also turn off this feature.

More usefully, some exceptionally bright spark has made a plugin called GlodaQuilla available. It's experimental but has not yet set fire to my laptop or caused my pets to explode - your experience may be different of course and any use of experimental plugins is completely at your own risk. I did the following and now have a full indexed search of the subset of my mail that interests me, along with a much more responsive machine (and some 500MB of disk space no longer used by the full-text index)

Install GlodaQuilla in the usual fashion
Restart Thunderbird
Disable indexing completely (see above for how to do that)
Quit Thunderbird and wait a few moments to make sure it's definitely no longer running
Delete the old full-text database taking up space on your hard drive. It's a file called /home/$username/.thunderbird/random.default/global-messages-db.sqlite on my Ubuntu Linux machine. You'll need to find your own global-messages-db.sqlite yourself, but the path above should give you a clue as to where it is.
Start Thunderbird and right click on a folder containing mail you do not want indexed. (e.g. my Archive/ folders contain old mail that I don't really need searched or indexed.) Uncheck 'Inherit' and you can now individually enable or disable indexing of the mail folder.
Once you have set which folders you do and do not want indexed, remember to re-enable indexing and restart Thunderbird, just to be sure to be sure.
Leave your computer for a period of time, if possible, as Thunderbird will need to rebuild indices for those mail folders you left with indexing enabled. This may take some time. Expect performance to be poor during this time. You can track activity by selecting Tools | Activity Manager from the menu.
Enjoy a nice, fast, performant full text search of the mails you actually care about searching and indexing.

posted at: 17:15 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry