My root filesystem (which contains /home/dpchrist/.thunderbird) is btrfs
and several years old. It has been acting funny for a while. STFW I
recently discovered that btrfs filesystems require maintenance
(balancing). Mine was at 100% usage. Balancing by hand was inadequate,
so I wrote a Perl script to repeatedly issue btrfs balance commands
until relocated chunks are zero. The script has relocated thousands of
chunks, but the filesystem still needs more:
2020-01-16 06:08:35 root@tinkywinky ~
# btrfs filesystem show /
Label: 'tinkywinky_r' uuid: f68d1e7f-bd68-49c4-a04f-ddf92beccd17
Total devices 1 FS bytes used 7.37GiB
devid 1 size 11.17GiB used 9.25GiB path /dev/mapper/sda3_crypt
I believe the Thunderbird problem I have been experiencing is caused by
the clogged btrfs filesystem. Just now, I dragged a message from my
IMAP Inbox to a Local Folder folder. Thunderbird removed the message
from the source and began writing it to the destination. Thunderbird
experienced delays in writing and changed the mouse pointer to a toilet
bowl. After several minutes, the toilet was still there and I closed
Thunderbird. When I opened Thunderbird again, the source message was
still gone and the destination folder contained an empty message.
Thunderbird lost the message.
So, the problem appears to be error handling design. When moving a
message, Thunderbird should confirm the destination has been
successfully written before deleting the source.
David
