Memory leak?

[jdfk...@gmail.com]

By selectively disabling Thunderbird add-ons I've concluded that Reminderfox appears to be causing a significant memory issue. I have to restart Thunderbird every few days as it bloats to eat all available memory (admittedly I don't have a ton to spare). I have been using it for many years so there is a significant history of reminders (albeit, not multiple per day or anything like that). Is this a known issue that simply needs a clearout of old entries? Is keeping birthdays with their original birthdate a problem (since there are so many virtual timepoints generated)? Or is there a memory leak plain and simple?

[gNeandr]

Thanks for reporting!

It's the first time in the history of Remimderfox such a question arose,
never heard or recognized a problem like "memory leak". Also I have to
admit it's unknown to me about tests that have been done on this. Maybe
Tom can comment on it.

One point catches my attention:

> Is keeping birthdays with their original birthdate a problem (since there are so many virtual timepoints generated)?

A birthday is a one day event! And normally that event is entered with a
"yearly" repeat. This will generate one and only one event which is
spanning for one and only one day. Not more!

But we have seen users which entered the birthday at it's origin date
and defined that as starting day, and think this way: I have to see that
event all over the years, so they entered a ending date of eg. some
where in future, say year 2020. That way the user generates an event
lasting form the birthday (assume an example of 9.Jan.1990) == start day
until 9.Jan2020 == end date. With repeating yearly you generate one
events lasting 30years = 30*365 entries!!! That will blow up your stack!
And doing that with multiple/different birthdays you end up with huge
huge ICS data file which not only has to be stored, loaded into memory
and needs to get processed.

Also there is the problem with "overlapping" events.  That is an event
lasts long that it's repeating period. For that the RmFX logic warns
with a popup, so I expect it's not the case. Maybe you have those
definitions in the past, but for the dialog will not popup, sorry didn't
tested for that.

Sounds a bit with what is in your ICS data?

Also I recommend to backup your ICS file and delete old years events
from the ICS file you actually work with.

Guenter

[jdfk...@gmail.com]

> A birthday is a one day event! And normally that event is entered with a
> "yearly" repeat. This will generate one and only one event which is
> spanning for one and only one day. Not more!

This is the way I use it.

> Also I recommend to backup your ICS file and delete old years events
> from the ICS file you actually work with.

I'll give this a shot, that is deleting old (except for birthdays) events and see if that fixes the memory issue. If so, it would confirm that (even mild) volume of old events is memory heavy.

Will take several days before I can give a meaningful result though.

[Tom Mutdosch]

We have not seen memory leaks historically, but rather processing issues with large number of ICS events causing Thunderbird or the browser to "lock up" periodically when all of the events are processed. We would typically see this if a user had a daily repeating event that repeated forever. We tried to help with this with the ReminderFox option to only show X number of upcoming instances of a single reminder.  You could try lowering that to see if it helps.

Also, as Guenter suggests you could check if there's any overlapping events.  I would probably back up my reminders file, and then try deleting past events, or certain repeating events and see if that helps improve the issue.  This might help narrow down if it's a particular set of events that ReminderFox is having trouble with.

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[Guenter]

Jonanthan any further details, feedback would be great!
Thanks
Guenter

[jdfk...@gmail.com]

I retract my initial report. The symptoms haven't repeated once I reported them (as usual, your car will make sounds for a year but as soon as you take it to the mechanic, problem goes away). I did try deleting old reminders, leaving just annual and current ones, but there really weren't many at all (under 100 anyway) so I can't imagine that being a cause.

So, ticket closed I guess. Sorry for the bother.