142194 - email address lookup is very slow compared to NS4.6

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Address Book & Contacts, defect)

Description

[Steve McMillen]

Email address lookup is very slow with an address book of 1000 entries.
Following are some times for comparison:
Mozilla RC1: 6-7 seconds
Netscape Mail 4.6: 3-4 seconds

The delay can be longer if there is a lot going on. I've seen it get as large as
20 seconds.

The delay creates problems when adding names to an email.  
In NS4.6 if you type ahead and press return or tab when there are more than 1
match you are prompted with a dialog to pick.
In Mozilla RC1, if you type ahead and press return or tab when there are more
than 1 match the first match is picked.  This is often not the right choice so
you end up having to go back and change it (or worse yet, you don't noticed your
mistake and send the wrong mail to the wrong person!)

For me this is an important usability bug.  My company has 1000 persons so I
notice this  right away.  However, I suspect many users will end up noticing
this issue once their Collected names address book hits the default limit of 700.

I suggest 2 things:
1. Try to speed up the search.  Possible cache the address book or at least give
the user an option for a memory cache of the addresses.
2. Enable an option for the user to not automaticaly pick a name if there are
more than 1. This may not be easy.  Maybe if that option forces a dialog like it
does in NS4.6.  Another option is not to respect the 'Enter" key if it was typed
ahead.  Flush any Enter keys in the keyboard buffer so the user does not
inadvertanly choose the wrong choice.  Bottom line is that when there is more
than 1 address the choice is ambiguous and thus the program should not just pick
the first one.

Comment 1

[Arnaud Ladrière]

Don't know if it's a bug or an enahcement, but for me this is a NECESSARY 
point. I have EXACTLY the same problems described above on windows 2000, PIII 
700 (not the fastest machine this days but it was fast enough before ..). I 
think the problem is heavily related with the address automated collection 
features. It's a great feature, but it does add some slowness to the - already 
slow - address book lookup !

I would recommend quite the same things : 
 - speed up the search
 - add a mechanism to prevent errors, as described above

PLUS, It would be great to render the "collect address" feature more 
intelligent :
 - it should not collect twice the same address
 - it should not collect twice the same names
 - it should not collect names / addresses already in another address book
 - smart regular cleaning mechanism with simple rules (delete older than ..., 
delete unanswered, delete addresses containing several digits, delete 
hotmail, ..)

I'm using retail 1.0

Comment 2

[Richard Neill]

I find this as well. It's realy irritating, and occurs even if I type the full
email address followed by enter. My 1GHz P3 takes upto 5 sec at full CPU load.

I tried deleting the collected addresses to no avail; my normal address book is
perhaps 400 cards in size. This problem is getting worse over time - I'm now on
1.1, having used Moz mail for a year (always upgrading the versions, but keeping
the profile).

My abook.mab  is still only 97kB, so it's not a "database grows uncontrollably"
type bug.

Comment 3

[mitch]

Attachment: address book lookup speed makes it almost unusable

Comment 4

[Dries Van Dyck]

I'm using Moz 1.4 (Build:20030704) on a RedHat 7.0, behaving due to a lot of
updates as a 7.3, Linux system with a PII-350 and 256 Mb RAM. 

My addressbook is small: about 300-350 addresses, but an addressbook lookup
takes about 10 to 15 seconds!! Netscape 4.7x (x in 6,7,8,9) did this on the same
system with a comparable addressbook in size in less than a second!!

I noticed that on Windows systems the addressbook lookup operation is several
factors faster. It hardly bothers me on Windows (I have Moz 1.4/WinMe on a
PII-350 with 128 Mb RAM at home) although its also slow... On Linux it drives me
crazy:
want to mail ten people -> 2.5 minutes just to lookup the addresses.. grrrrrrr.

Whatever the source of this problem is, it's considerably faster on M$ Winblows
than Linux... 

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
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Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.