On 29/11/24 10:10, Will McDonald wrote:
On Thu, 28 Nov 2024 at 22:50, Stephen Morris <steve.morris.au@gmail.com> wrote:
On 29/11/24 09:45, Will McDonald wrote:
On Thu, 28 Nov 2024 at 22:31, Stephen Morris <steve.morris.au@gmail.com> wrote:
HI,
    When I run IOTOP, the first column is TID, what is TID? This display is showing in excess of 50 entries for Thunderbird where all of them have a unique TID value, is Thunderbird really starting that many threads?

Thanks Will, that is what I thought it might be.
It still begs the question with what it is showing, with me running the upstream daily version of Thunderbird, is it really starting the 50 - 60 threads that iotop is showing?

I don't use Thunderbird but I'd guess it's just the application architecture: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/01/23/thunderbird-will-use-multiple-processes-in-the-future/

How many 'thunderbird' processes is ps showing?

For example, using Firefox for comparison, I have 3 windows open, 7 tabs in total and:

[wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ ps -ef | grep [f]irefox | wc -l
22

You could go try and figure out what each of those threads is doing with strace or core dumps, maybe go read through some of the upstream project lists and/or issues? 

Other than 'why are there loads of these' is there a problem? pstree might give you more of an inkling as to how they're being created/consumed.
I've run iotop now with Thunderbird running and there are only around 20 threads, all of which are showing 0 in the read and write columns, as they were in the original display, and ps -ef | grep -i thunderbird | wc -l and it tells me there are 5.
I've issue pstree and for the thunderbird-bin sub-branch of thunderbird-bin it tells me there are 89 instances of that sub-branch. I'm not that concerned that it is a problem, although for any one that has a machine configured at the lower end of the scale it could be, but I'm more concerned around them hanging around if they are actually dormant as iotop is indicating, which is also one of the reasons I have configured thunderbird to not continue running processes after thunderbird is shut down.

regards,
Steve