High memory usage and performance issues with large contact database
I have close to 8000 emails and phone numbers collected over the years in Thunderbird.
After installing and setting up CardBook to sync these with a radicale server, managing the list became much easier.
However it also became considerably slower and now requires a lot more resources.
So far the following major symptoms are visible:
- When CardBook starts syncing, Thunderbird spikes an additional 500Mb of RAM and slows down considerably.
- On the contact list, if several contacts are selected, navigating suddenly becomes sluggish. Selecting the whole list makes it impossible to scroll and CPU spikes to 100%.
- Cardbook reports:
7739 contacts, 2536 locally modified
. Yet I've synced the full list several times. Is the high number of 'locally modified' records causing the performance problems?
Points 2. and 3. are not terrible since I rarely need to select more than a few contacts.
Point 1. however, often forces my system into swapping slowing down the entire system.
In particularly bad cases Thunderbird even displays a message box asking if I want to stop one of cardbook's scripts due to taking too long to finish.
With regards to 1., I've already reduced the frequency of syncing and delayed the first sync after starting Thunderbird but the high memory requirement leading to swapping was motivating enough to open this issue.
Is there something that can be done about the high memory requirements and the slowness mentioned above?