In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 17, 2016 15:52 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: In search of a home for Thunderbird by nye
Parent article: In search of a home for Thunderbird

I use Windows a fair bit :-(

Windows networking can cripple the rest of the machine ...

So if I've created an email with a large attachment (my camera is a 24MP jobbie), and I attach such a picture to an email, hitting "send" can bring the machine to a crawl, especially if I'm trying to access further large pictures to attach to emails.

By going off-line, everything happens at local-bus speeds. I can create say ten emails nice and quick. Then I go back online, and while Thunderbird may crawl uploading, chances are I'm no longer doing loads of i/o and I can get on with something else on the laptop without being hampered by what's going on in the background.

Cheers,
Wol

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 18, 2016 22:22 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

Wow.

I won't say you're wrong. For me, I have literally never experienced this, from Windows XP to Vista, 7, 8.1 or 10. I use Thunderbird too since it works on Linux and on Windows.

Windows networking might not be the greatest but it was never that bad in my experience.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 23, 2016 14:23 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

We had a case where streaming data from Linux over the wire was fine, but running the server locally on Windows 7 would chug along slowly. Ended up being that IPv6 on the wireless stack was confusing things. Not sure what in the server bit was tickling slow code paths, but turning off wireless and IPv6 support made things go smoothly (I don't remember if only one solved the problem, but we turned off both anyways).

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 19, 2016 14:36 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

Needless to say, this is not remotely normal. I feel like you'd be better off figuring out what exactly is so desperately and uniquely wrong with your machine than just trying to work around the symptoms.

Best guess, some kind of seriously shonky third-party NIC driver, possibly one designed for a different OS than the one you're actually using (and thus with bugs that didn't get triggered when it was written in 2001, or whatever, but do now) or even different hardware.

I would definitely try the latest version of the relevant driver from the chip manufacturer (as opposed to the board manufacturer, so if it's a DodgyCorp NIC or MB with a Realtek chip for example, I'd go to Realtek), and I might also try a slightly older but not prehistoric version. Unless it's Broadcom of course, in which case I'd use a hammer.

Of course it could actually be hardware.