Reduce Thunderbird Memory Usage

If you leave Thunderbird on all day then this 'hack' is for you. The same tweak for Firefox has been widely publicised all over the place. That tweak moves some of Firefox's data to the page file when it is minimized, which reduces the RAM usage. This can be very effective if your system is low on memory. However, it has been noticed that restoring/maximizing Firefox can be slower as it has to fetch the data from the hard disc again. We can also use this tweak in Thunderbird.

Following are the steps:-
1) In Thunderbird, go to Tools > Options and choose the Advanced tab.
2) Click the button next to Advanced Configuration labelled Config Editor.
3) This brings up a similar window to Firefox's about:config page, right click on some white space and choose New Boolean.
4) Enter config.trim_on_minimize as the preference name and select true as the value.
5) Close this window and restart Thunderbird.


Now you can open Task manager and find the thunderbird.exe process, note the memory usage and minimize the Thunderbird window. Does the memory usage drastically reduce? Good you've successfully reduced the memory usage of Thunderbird.

-- extracted from internet --