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? Also when I run IOTOP I get a display in the middle of the screen that says "task_delayacct is OFF press Ctrl-T to toggle". If I press ctrl-t to toggle it on it stop displaying the item consuming the most I/O at the top of the display, and if I toggle it back off it goes back to showing the biggest I/O consumer at the top. What is task_delayacct and what is IOTOP doing with it?
regards, Steve
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?
https://serverfault.com/questions/312815/iotop-fields-what-does-tid-mean-in-...
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?https://serverfault.com/questions/312815/iotop-fields-what-does-tid-mean-in-...
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?
regards, Steve
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?
https://serverfault.com/questions/312815/iotop-fields-what-does-tid-mean-in-...
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...
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.
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.
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? https://serverfault.com/questions/312815/iotop-fields-what-does-tid-mean-in-iotopThanks 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...
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
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