On Fri, 2024-11-29 at 09:31 +1100, Stephen Morris wrote:
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?
Very likely. Thunderbird, and web browsers are huge apps. One might say that Thunderbird is very bloated for something that does email. I do, judging it by how slow it is compared to other similar apps.
Behind the scenes what is it doing? You'll never know everything but there's a lot going on if you start to think about it...
it's checking for mail, often repeatedly it's sorting mail it's managing its cache, in every mail folder it's checking its calendar it's probably reporting private stats to the internet it's probably checking for updates it's drawing its interface it's rendering an email into some fancy display it's updating parts of its interface as you do things it's listening for what you want to do with it you're interacting with it
Lot's of what it does is a bunch of separate tasks, rather than just one processing stepping through a series of things.
You've only got to wiggle the mouse around on top of an app's window, without even clicking on anything, to see its CPU use go up in top. Apps are only somewhat idle when you think they're just sitting there doing nothing.