187383 - Slow to delete all messages in a (large) folder of mail

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Database, enhancement)

Description

[nigels]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212

Being a new year, time to manually flush out some folders
of low-priority email such as mail lists, etc.

However, selecting the folder pressing CTRL-A (select all)
and then DEL to delete, is quite slow.  (On my 1700+ AMD box,
100 messages in 6 seconds, the rest of Mozilla freezes until
finished)  During this operation, access to disk is intense.

Seems to me that a delete-all should be faster than this, and
perhaps could be handled as a special case.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select desired folder
2. Press CTRL-A or File->Select->All
3. Press DEL to delete all messages
Actual Results:  
A wait longer than expected.

Expected Results:  
Zap the whole box in a fast way.

Comment 1

[lohphat]

This may be related to bug 184434 where coping mail between folders is slow.  In
deleting all mail in a folder it's actually copying to the Trash folder.

Comment 2

[Benton Lam]

I'm running Mozilla on a Windows 2000 system. The problem is that again, when
you select a large number of mail, and click delete, v1.1 is perfectly fine and
quick, while v1.2 and v1.3 is quite slow. Slow enough for Windows to think
Mozilla have crashed.
I would select at least 300 messages at the time, and v1.1 is perfectly fine,
while again,  v1.2 & v1.3 (latest download) is very sluggish.
I run an AMB 1.3GHz and 768MB, and it's very quick with previous versions anyways.
Like the description below, it's always reproducible by just selecting a large
amount of email, click (press) delete and it would be sluggish. HD activity is
high, but doesn't completely rob the system of the CPU.
Appreciate if you guys would look into why the discrepency between v1.1 and the
newest version.

Comment 3

[Andreas Lupert]

Benton Lam exactly describes what I am perceiving as well. Compared to v1.1, all
later versions (v1.2.1, v1.3a and v1.3b) are significantly slower and and disk
activity encreases quite considerable. Copying from folder to folder showed the
same effect in v1.2.1 and v1.3a whereas v1.3b behaves fine like v1.1.

Comment 4

[Benton Lam]

1.4a still kind of have this bug, but I suppose it improved a bit. 260 messages
in 23 seconds on a 1.33GHz/768MB/50GB Athlon system on Win2k.
1.1 was like within 5 for this small amount of email.
And why is this bug still unconfirmed?
If you want to confirm, just subscribe to a couple of high traffic mailing list
and delete all the mail in one folder on 1.2-1.4a

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

this should be fixed in 1.4b - a fix was checked in 4/19 - have you used a newer
build than that?

Comment 6

[Benton Lam]

1.4b (nightly build) seems to have it all fixed.
I was deleting all the mail in the trash folder (6100+ unread) and it was done within 5 seconds, which is comparable to the old 1.1's performance!

Comment 7

[lohphat]

ME TOO!  ;-)     2003050509 win32