Bugzilla

> Do you have a suggestion? Or, are you implying there may be some type of user who will want to adjust a preference?

It's already a preference (`mail.imap.hdr_chunk_size`) that defaults to 200, which gives us the 4-5x slowdown we're seeing. Realistically, I don't see average users tuning this, or even understanding its effect, so if we're going to keep chunking in place, we should tune it for them.

I agree with Magnus' concern that it may lead to more downloads than a user wants, especially on a metered connection or something. We can control that, but this all happens right at startup and we're subscribed to all folders by default, so a user would have to unsubscribe quickly to avoid everything starting to download.

Another thought from an a11y perspective is whether watching a big scroll with thousands of messages (as we get without any chunking) by default which leads to a lot of quickly flashing text rolling by on the screen could be an issue for some users.

Since we're debating a tradeoff that really ends up being a user experience thing, should we get any of the UX folks involved in this to help decide on the best course of action? If so, we might want to pick a small short term fix for this that can get uplifted into 140esr and decide on a longer term approach to making this phase of starting up or connecting to an account more manageable.

> Do you have a suggestion? Or, are you implying there may be some type of user who will want to adjust a preference?

It's already a preference (`mail.imap.hdr_chunk_size`) that defaults to 200, which gives us the 4-5x slowdown we're seeing. Realistically, I don't see average users tuning this, or even understanding its effect, so if we're going to keep chunking in place, we should tune it for them. Using a chunk size of 1000, we can get it down to almost the same as without chunking, so I'm guessing with 500 or so we can convert it to a 2-3x slowdown rather than the 4-6x we're getting now.

I agree with Magnus' concern that it may lead to more downloads than a user wants, especially on a metered connection or something. We can control that, but this all happens right at startup and we're subscribed to all folders by default, so a user would have to unsubscribe quickly to avoid everything starting to download.

Another thought from an a11y perspective is whether watching a big scroll with thousands of messages (as we get without any chunking) by default which leads to a lot of quickly flashing text rolling by on the screen could be an issue for some users.

Since we're debating a tradeoff that really ends up being a user experience thing, should we get any of the UX folks involved in this to help decide on the best course of action? If so, we might want to pick a small short term fix for this that can get uplifted into 140esr and decide on a longer term approach to making this phase of starting up or connecting to an account more manageable.

> Do you have a suggestion? Or, are you implying there may be some type of user who will want to adjust a preference?

It's already a preference (`mail.imap.hdr_chunk_size`) that defaults to 200, which gives us the 4-5x slowdown we're seeing. Realistically, I don't see average users tuning this, or even understanding its effect, so if we're going to keep chunking in place, we should tune it for them. Using a chunk size of 1000, we can get it down to almost the same as without chunking, so I'm guessing with 500 or so we can convert it to a 2-3x slowdown rather than the 4-6x we're getting now.

I agree with Magnus' concern that it may lead to more downloads than a user wants, especially on a metered connection or something. We can control that, but this all happens right at startup and we're subscribed to all folders by default, so a user would have to unsubscribe quickly to avoid everything starting to download.

Another thought from an a11y perspective is whether watching a big scroll with thousands of messages (as we get without any chunking) by default which leads to a lot of quickly flashing text rolling by on the screen could be an issue for some users.

Since we're debating a tradeoff that really ends up being a user experience thing, should we get any of the UX folks involved in this to help decide on the best course of action? If so, we might want to pick a small short term fix for this that can get uplifted into 140esr and decide on a longer term approach to making this phase of starting up or connecting to an account more manageable, as it's part of the overall onboarding experience.