1066337 - mail message sorting much slower in 2.29 than 2.26.1

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Baxter]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0 SeaMonkey/2.29
Build ID: 20140829004359

Steps to reproduce:

In the message list, I click between "From" tab and "Date" tab, or type some characters into the search box that searches "From" and "Subject" fields


Actual results:

Since upgrading to 2.29 from 2.26.1 on Mac OSX 10.6.8 on intel i7, the sorting still works, but takes up to several seconds and sometimes the window shows shuffling of results when doing a search.


Expected results:

In v2.26.1 and prior versions, these sort and search operations were essentially instantaneous. Something appears to have changed in how the sorting and searching is accomplished. Note: this is not the same as going to the "Search Messages" window via the Tools menu; that was always a slower search, but until now the sorting and searching directly via the message display pane was very fast.

Comment 1

[Philip Chee]

Confirming as sander over on IRC also reported this problem

Comment 2

[Sander]

After some testing based on this report, I can confirm that the behaviour I see is indeed (mostly) due to sorting. I have a couple of folders which I've sorted by default (primarily my catchall junk folders; sorted by recipient, with the custom view set to "unread", so I can swiftly pick out the occasional newly arrived false positive) - just opening those folders takes ~3 seconds, with that delay seeming to be caused about equally by the custom view and by the sorting (if I toggle those on an off separately - wildly inaccurate measurement of course) - in 2.26 I never noticed any slowdown opening them at all.
The slowdown seems to be completely CPU-bound - I have one core spiking to 100%.
A folder with 5k messages in it still has acceptable performance; a folder with 20k messages in it lags very annoyingly. 

I see similar behaviour for folders which aren't 'sorted', but have messages threaded (www-style e.a.) - cold 'cache' opening of that folder (60k messages) takes ~2 seconds, warm cache ~1 second; again, 2.26 had no such noticeable lag.

(Toggling sorting and custom views back forth for a minute, I even seemed to get in some kind of deadlock situation, with the CPU spiking to 100% for half a minute, and the rest of SeaMonkey going completely unresponsive.)

Comment 3

[Baxter]

My inbox has about 11k messages in it, and typing into the search box or changing columns to sort by takes more than 3 seconds. To confirm that it is not something weird with my inbox, I downgraded back to 2.26.1 and the same search and sort operations still take only about 0.1 seconds (they appear instantaneous). So, something definitely changed in the 2.29 release that is slowing things down by orders of magnitude.

Comment 4

[Michal Kec (MiK)]

I can confirm this issue on Ubuntu Linux LTS 14.04 and 12.04 for both IMAP and POP3 folders.

Comment 5

[Baxter]

This was reported about 6 weeks ago.  2.29.1 is old news and the current release is 2.30 now. Has this bug been addressed?

Comment 6

[Michal Kec (MiK)]

I believe this bug is fixed for several years already.