Improving performace of Google Contacts

As many users reported, Google Contacts will slow down Thunderbird when you load many contacts. I started to address the issue and I uploaded the first beta. Please download v0.5.50b1 and try it. Don't forget to backup your contacts before use it. I don't owe any responsibilities for any problems such as data lost.

This beta addresses two performance issues. One is that Thunderbird will freeze when you load many contacts. Freezing Thunderbird is caused by occupying CPU power while loading and parsing contacts data from Google. The new beta yields sometimes while processing data. It will reduce the "Unresponsive script" warnings. Please note it only reduces periods Google Contacts occupy CPU power and it will not shorten the time for a synchronization.

Another issue is high memory usage. When you load many contacts, for example more than 1000 contacts, Google Contacts receives 10MB data or more. It holds it in the main memory and don't release until Thunderbird is finished. So, Thunderbird sometime uses more than 100MB memory and may slow down your PC. v0.5.50b1 newly has a cache functionality. It shares the same memory usage in synchronization.But after the synchronization, it try to release data in the memory. It is experimental functionality and I don't know whether it works on your environment. If you don't need it, you can disable it in the option dialog of Google Contacts. See "Advanced" tab in the dialog.

I don't have contacts whose size is enough to test the version. So, I have not sure the effectivity of the changes. Please let me know how much does it improve or make it worse if you can test it.

And again, please don't forget to backup your data.