Friday 19 October 2012

EDS Killing Thunderbird

I’ve finally worked out why Thunderbird email has been almost unusable since upgrading my various Ubuntu machines to Precise Pangolin 12.04.

The symptoms were very sluggish Thunderbird interface response, leading to a segmentation fault crash. The crashes only happened sometimes and didn’t seem to follow a pattern of time from start-up.

The EDS Contact Integration Add-on seems to have been responsible. EDS is the Evolution Data Server and although I don’t use Evolution directly, I have registered my various Google and Twitter accounts, which apparently get pulled in by EDS too.

I have quite a few Google contacts (>700), so I can only assume that the add-on is trying to process them all.

Anyway, the immediate problem is solved by disabling the add-on. I use a google contact sync plug-in anyway, which works fine, so as far as I know I’m not missing out on anything.