thunderbird pegs and hogs hard drive disc io

[thufir]

On Sat, 14 Mar 2015 20:53:42 +0000, Colin Law wrote:

>> I've rebooted, and am going to go through tbird to make sure it's not
>> trying to archive everything, but this seems a bit unprecedented.  Any
>> pointers/logs to look at/etc?
> 
> How much RAM have you got and how much cache and how much (if any) cache
> is in use (top will show you that)?  What you have described sounds like
> the classic symptom of disk thrashing due to running out of RAM and
> having to use the cache.

free -h shows:

Mem:          1.9G       1.6G       314M

yes, disk thrashing sounds right.  I think it's (typically) thunderbird 
which pushes the system over the edge, but I'm not certain.  It happened 
again.  I read the wikipedia entry on this, and suppose I'll just run 
fewer programs for now.  :(


-Thufir