My PC has recently been chugging a lot more than usual – massive disk activity and high CPU utilisation. Looking into it I quickly realised that it was happening whenever Thunderbird received a large bolus of new email – more than 15-20 emails within a minute or two. When I clicked on the folder with the new email, I could see in the status bar at the bottom that Thunderbird was very slowly downloading these new emails, while my disk and CPU went crazy.
Looking further I noticed that in Filemon, AVG was doing a lot of the work. Disabling AVG’s “Resident Shield” during one of these operations almost immediately fixes the symptoms – the email comes down much faster and the disk activity and CPU returns to normal.
This seemed to happen around the same time as Thunderbird v15.x was released, but I don’t want to declare that the culprit, especially as it is probably the same thing that I noticed with Microsoft Security Essentials that started happening around v11.x. I’m curious if something fundamental changed back then – either internally in Thunderbird, or perhaps within AVG – but it’s certainly possible that I’m just getting a little bit more email now and it’s just tripped my PC over the edge. I assume it has something to do with the way AVG hooks into the disk reading/writing operations – possibly Thunderbird changed something low-level there and it is simply reacting badly with how AVG does its real-time checking.
In any case, if you are experiencing massive slowdowns and system chunkiness using Thunderbird in conjunction with AVG, you can simply temporarily disable the real-time checking when getting a large number of emails. Obviously you probably don’t want to leave it off altogether.