1070754 - Menus don't render immediately in Thunderbird 31 if hardware acceleration is on

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Seth Randall]

Attachment: Tools Menu Outline

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.120 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Click on any menu


Actual results:

The menu doesn't render immediately. It can take up to 30 seconds or more. If I click on the empty space where a menu option should be, the option works as expected. I just can't see what they are.


Expected results:

The menu should display.

Comment 1

[Seth Randall]

This is a new install of Thunderbird 31.1.1 running the default profile on Windows 7 Pro. No extensions or Add-Ons are installed. Restarting Thunderbird in Safe Mode appears to fix the issue. The only thing I can find that is disabled by doing that is the default theme.

Comment 2

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

What theme are you using, Seth?

Comment 3

[Seth Randall]

I am using the default theme that ships with Thunderbird. It is a completely clean install on a computer that hasn't had Thunderbird on it before.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Seth Randall from comment #1)
> The only thing I can find that is disabled by doing that is the default theme.

Thanks for testing in safe mode.  Many things are disabled other than addons and themes.  One of them is mozilla's graphics hardware acceleration (HWA) 

hardware acceleration can be controlled by the preference gfx.direct2d.disabled in about:config - when its value is true, then HWA is disabled.

access about:config at Toosl | options | advanced | general | config editor

Comment 5

[Seth Randall]

Disabling HWA appears to have fixed the issue. Does that mean there's a bug in Thunderbird or the video driver (or possibly both?)

Regardless, I don't really need HWA I'm guessing, so I will run with it off for now.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Seth Randall from comment #5)
> Disabling HWA appears to have fixed the issue. Does that mean there's a bug
> in Thunderbird or the video driver (or possibly both?)
> 
> Regardless, I don't really need HWA I'm guessing, so I will run with it off
> for now.

Thanks for the update. 

Can you post the graphics section information from Thunderbird's Help | Troublshooting.  And also check to see if you have the latest video driver?

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

bug 950133 reenables HWA

Comment 8

[Seth Randall]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #7)
> bug 950133 reenables HWA

I've attached pictures of the Graphics section from Troubleshooting. I loaded the latest driver from NVidia (I believe I was using the default Lenovo one before) and the problem appears to be gone now.

Comment 9

[Seth Randall]

Attachment: Direct 2d Disabled.PNG

Comment 10

[Seth Randall]

Attachment: Direct 2D Enabled.png

Comment 11

[Philip Chee]

I find that turning off layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled without disabling hardware acceleration completely also works.

Comment 12

[Philip Chee]

(In reply to Philip Chee from comment #11)
> I find that turning off layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled without
> disabling hardware acceleration completely also works.
CC: :mattwoodrow perhaps he can supply some insight on what's happening.

Comment 13

[Matt Woodrow (:mattwoodrow)]

Switching ni to Bas, since this looks like a windows OMTC regression.

Comment 14

[Philip Chee]

Another data point:
(From bug 950133 comment #2)
> JFTR, this change made Thunderbird scroll jerky again (in the mail list
> pane, most notably in an unmaximized TB window) on my Win7 64bit system with
> AMD Radeon HD 7700.
> 
> Manually setting "gfx.direct2d.disabled" to "true" reverted TB to perfectly
> smooth scrolling in the mail list pane (and everywhere else).

Comment 15

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

This is likely caused by some form of GPU contention, what I can't explain is why we don't have similar reports for firefox.

Comment 16

[Philip Chee]

(In reply to Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten) from comment #15)
> This is likely caused by some form of GPU contention, what I can't explain
> is why we don't have similar reports for firefox.

I can reproduce this on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0

So possibly a driver issue.

Comment 17

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Seth, have you been able to resolve this with a driver update for your Nvidia 5400M?

Comment 18

[Seth Randall]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, use Needinfo for questions) from comment #17)
> Seth, have you been able to resolve this with a driver update for your
> Nvidia 5400M?

Wayne, I am now running 38.0.1. I've been running with layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled set to false for a long time now. I'd forgotten I'd even done it. It's set to true now and things look just fine.

Comment 19

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Philip Chee from comment #16)
> (In reply to Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten) from comment #15)
> > This is likely caused by some form of GPU contention, what I can't explain
> > is why we don't have similar reports for firefox.
> 
> I can reproduce this on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:35.0)
> Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
> 
> So possibly a driver issue.

Philip, can you still reproduce?

Comment 20

[Philip Chee]

> Philip, can you still reproduce?
Nope. Looks like it's now WORKSFORME