Closed Bug 1662586 Opened 4 years ago Closed 3 years ago

Frequent keyboard entry (typing) issues resulting in garbage text

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Message Compose Window
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: shdwdrgn, Unassigned)

Details

(Keywords: perf)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

Unfortunately I don't have a clear way to reproduce this issue. As best I can tell it may have something to do with deleting some characters? I have frequently deleting a typo, begin typing a few more characters, then the output appears to start repeating the characters I had deleted rather than the actual keyboard letter typed.

Operating system: Debian 8 with Mate desktop (updated to latest releases for this OS)

Actual results:

Under TB68 everything worked as expected. I had to upgrade to the v78 nightly version in June due to OAth2 issues and this is where I first started having problems.

While typing emails, the keyboard input will suddenly start adding random characters. It doesn't matter what I actually type, including deletes, ctrl-c, or the arrow keys, the characters repeated on the screen continue to appear for each keystroke. Once this starts happening, there is no way to finish the email. Attempting to close the email results in TB locking up completely about half the time (requiring the program to be killed from the command line), other times I can quit from the toolbar but this always ends in a crash notification after a couple minutes.

Under the nightly versions this was happening about twice a week. When 78.0.1 was released the problem started happening every day. With 78.1.1 and 78.1.0esr the problem is happening multiple times each day.

This problem does not affect any other software on my computer, and when the keyboard issue begins to happen I can paste my email text (using the mouse to copy) into a new or already-open text editor window. I can continue typing in firefox tabs or any other program I already have open, and I can open new programs without a problem. Closing and restarting thunderbird allows me to continue on for several hours before it starts acting up again. Rebooting has not helped, nor even slowed down the problem.

I posted a question to the thunderbird support forum about this issue but didn't get any replies. I'm still not sure exactly what is going on but I wanted to at least get a bug posted to track the issue and hopefully get some new ideas to try.

Expected results:

The expected results were that the characters I type on the keyboard should be shown in the message I am typing.

Just an update to the ticket... it's been two months since I submitted it but still no response. The issue still persists, although it seems like the frequency may be related to how quickly I'm trying to type an email. Pasting content doesn't seem to affect this, but on days where I'm busy and trying to type emails quickly it appears to trigger the issue more frequently. Over the weekends when I send few emails this problem almost never occurs.

Something I've noticed that may be related... A lot of times I will see my text entry pause for several seconds, and once TB catches up with the keyboard cache anything I enter after that will start showing the random characters. TB itself appears to be sucking a lot of CPU time during that delay.

As before, I still have not seen this happen in any other program, including Firefox 78 where I may type out fast and long responses on forums, but it never drops a key or substitutes what I type for other characters like I see in TB. I think this rules out the possibility that this is an OS problem or I would also be seeing it happen in other software.

I experiment the same behaviour with TB 78.4.1 on MacOS High Sierra.
I select text, begin to type and the message windows does not refresh in real time.
Text cursor disappears so I don't know where TB is working.
TB seems to record the events, be it text input and clicks, so the result can be text scattered following the random clicks...

(In reply to quodliber from comment #2)

I experiment the same behaviour with TB 78.4.1 on MacOS High Sierra.
I select text, begin to type and the message windows does not refresh in real time.
Text cursor disappears so I don't know where TB is working.
TB seems to record the events, be it text input and clicks, so the result can be text scattered following the random clicks...

Confirm edit window not updating on High Sierra with TB 78.4.3. Sometimes cursor up or down will trigger a refresh. I think this is different that O.P's bug.

Yeah I do see text entry hang up occasionally when the OS gets busy, but that gets buffered and comes out once the OS catches up again. I think that's the closest thing I've experienced to what the previous two posts have described?

The issue I'm reporting here doesn't seem to correlate to any issues within the OS, it's just TB itself that hangs up, and any text I type after that point is garbled. I can generally copy my previous text with the mouse, then I attempt to close TB so I can restart it. About half the time when I attempt to close it, the whole program will lock up and I have to kill it.

I'm pretty sure our issue is different, something in old Macs High Sierra graphics. I started a new post.

Another update to this ticket which I've noticed over the months... This issue is only happening when I am typing messages on an account that uses the new OAuth2 authentication with outlook.com. I have never once had a lockup or garbage text appear while working in standard IMAP accounts, this only occurs when entering messages from my work account.

If this is happening while you're in the email composer, then the only way I can see the account or server making any difference is if the mail is being saved as draft, which happens regularly every 5 minutes or so. But even in that case, it should not influence the composer contents while you're tying. Only when you re-open the composer.

FWIW, your bug description has too much prose. It's difficult to extract hard facts. Other than "my keyboard adds characters I didn't want, and it happens only for that one account".

More importantly, to fix a bug, developers need a reliable reproduction, which shows the bug every time. If you cannot show how to reproduce the bug at will on the developer's machine, then developers cannot investigate it, and cannot test any theories they have about the bug, which prevents a fix. A reliable reproduction is always the first step to a bug fix. I understand that you cannot deliver that, because the bug is not happening for your every time, and you don't know why it happens, but neither do the developers. That's the reason why it's not being fixed. I know it's hard to accept. Just explaining.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I understand how important it is to be able to reproduce a bug since I write code myself, but unfortunately there's no specific condition that seems to cause this, and as a developer I'm keen on watching for patterns.. Sometimes I can go for a few days without it happening, sometimes it occurs 3-4 times a day, but typically it's at least once a day. It doesn't seem to matter how many emails I send out during the day. It doesn't have anything to do with the auto-save because some emails will see it start to happen in the first sentence while other emails I may type several paragraphs. The only thing consistent in all of this is that it always happens while typing emails in my work account (connected to O365 with OAuth2), but never occurs in my personal mailboxes which I also use throughout the day. Also it only started happening with my work email after I switched to OAuth2 authentication last July. There had not been any issues when connecting to that account with IMAP for the previous 8 years, but O365 forced us to change.

The randomness is part of what's so frustrating about this bug. I haven't noticed any correlation to times when my system may be slowed down, or with other internet activity. I can type up a string of emails all day without a problem or can can send a few and then have one suddenly fail.

As for the garbled characters -- what I've noticed is that when this starts happening it seems to pick either one or two specific characters (different every time this happens), and as I'm typing it will cycle through showing the letters I type, replacing my letters with these one or two characters, or not showing anything at all for my keystrokes. And it doesn't matter what keys I type, whether letters&numbers, backspaces and returns, or anything else, they will still be replaced by those one or two characters that it has chosen (I found this out while attempting to highlight and copy my entered text before restarting TB, it would frequently wipe out the text completely!). At this point I can attempt to close the message without saving, then close TB, and either that will succeed, or the window that normally asks if I want to save my message will be empty and TB has locked up completely, requiring me to kill the process.

That is about as clear as I can make this issue, with what I've learned from dealing with it over the past half a year. The issue still persists, I had to kill TB this morning. I'll probably try upgrading to the latest version once again this weekend just to cover my bases.

Please turn off spell check as you type. What are the results? And if you still see the problem, what does the OS indicate for thunderbird process' CPU and memory usage? Please be very brief in your response.

Keywords: perf
Summary: Frequent keyboard entry issues resulting in garbage text → Frequent keyboard entry (typing) issues resulting in garbage text

The issue has been happening MUCH less frequently lately so it took a bit to see another failure since I turned off the spellcheck. CPU usage appeared normal at the time (I see a spike during incoming and outgoing messages, but otherwise CPU for thunderbird is < 1%). I'll check again on future failures.

Just happened again today. Thunderbird is using almost nothing for CPU (it doesn't show on 'top') and 11.8% memory (out of 8GB). After restarting, TB settles in around 6% memory usage.

But it is now much less frequent, correct?

Hard to say at this point. The comment about it happening less frequently was in general, even before I turned off spellcheck. Which seems counter-intuitive because I've been working my computer hard on a coding project over the past three months and haven't rebooted in that time. I believe this is the first time I've had to restart TB two days in a row for at least a month. Will keep monitoring though.

Another failure today, not sure why all the sudden it is going crazy again. Thunderbird is up to 12.1% memory usage, and hitting between 0 to 77% cpu (this cycles every minute so I assume it is connected to checked for new messages).

I wanted to post an update on this ticket and let you know it can be closed. A few weeks ago I upgraded my desktop from debian Jessie to Stretch, and the issue appears to have resolved itself. At least I have not had any repeat of the problem. I was never able to determine what exactly was causing this, but I assume something in the previous installation was corrupted.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for their attempts to help troubleshoot.

Thanks for keeping us updated

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 3 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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