1752280 - Viewing certain emails with large, rotated image attachments takes 1-3 minutes (Thunderbird unresponsive while loading jpg inline preview, seems to freeze, hang with high CPU)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Lappies]

Attachment: IMG_20220126_154203.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.99 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Click on new email to view

Actual results:

It takes about 1-3 minutes to load the preview and Thunderbird hangs for this time.

Pictures was taken and sent with a XIAOMI Redmi Note 9 Pro.

I get a lot of emails with photos attached send by mobilephones. I would say <5% of them have this problem. In my opinion it is due to the image format.

All mailboxes are set up via IMAP and offline reading.

If I send the photo from an external gmx account to my company address, I have this effect.
If I send the photo to my private address, also IMAP and another hoster (Strato) I have the same effect.

Menu -> View -> Show attached files switched off and open attachment manually works immediately even if network cable is disconnected from PC, so no IMAP and cache problem.

Menu -> View -> Show attachments included switched on, takes about 1-2 minutes to load a preview and during this time TB "hangs".

Without the network cable, it's exactly the same, takes about 1-2 minutes to load and TB hangs.

Photo sent to my wife's e-mail account, also IMAP with local storage, and opened on different PC with TB, same thing.

So it is not due to a defective profile etc. I would say.

Message copied to a Gmail account, also connected via IMAP in TB, same thing, with or without network.

Message copied to Local Folder -> Trash, same game, with or without network.

Message saved on desktop and then opened by double-clicking, same game, with or without network.

2 minutes later, the customer sent me another e-mail, this time she must have selected "image reduced" before sending it.

Exactly the same pictures, this time only 423KB in size. The problem does not occur here.

If I wait the 1-3 Minutes everything is fine, if I pick another E-Mail and come back to this email, some story, loading 1-3 minutes and TB hangs.

Expected results:

Open preview fast after first download.

Attachemt Image added

Comment 1

[newsfan]

Attachment: test.eml

Test message containing the image as attachment.

Comment 2

[newsfan]

Alice, could you help out here. With "View > Display Attachments Inline", display the message after importing it into a local folder.

In TB 91 that takes ~20 seconds for me, in TB 97 it's a fraction of a second. When did this improve? I also observed the following strange effect. After running TB 97 on the profile, the message displays quickly in TB 91 as if something were cached from TB 97. In TB 91, when displaying a different message and then getting back to this on, it's always slow.

Comment 3

[newsfan]

Additional information: After stripping the (excessive) EXIF data from the picture (using https://www.exifpurge.com/) it displays quickly when attached to a message. It would still be good to know when the behavior improved in TB.

Comment 4

[Alice0775 White]

In Tb91.5.1, if you display the message immediately after importing it, it works as expected.
However, if I switch to another message and then try to view that message again, the problem occurs.

Progression(improved) window:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=8aa30c8f177d54c4eae7fbf19d0d21e1596d6476&tochange=3709ede8642c62852a5976b352326bdd28c5ea15
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=5131e85ba86f21f54bfc806ae69a7e89218f7a61&tochange=ef7b596bb385f46280eb1492009bf8fb541e17db

Bug 1734360,Bug 1732903 seems to have improved the display speed of inline images.

Comment 5

[newsfan]

Thanks a lot, Alice. I think the improvement was caused by bug 1732115. The picture in question is in fact upside-down and TB rotates it correctly before displaying it. As mentioned in comment #3, removing the EXIF data which triggers the rotation brings this to normal display speed.

My suggestion is to declare this FIXED by bug 1732115.

Comment 9

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Add some keywords to summary for better retrievability.

For TB 91, possible workarounds:

• Uncheck ≡ > View > Display Attachments inline. You won't see preview of attached images, but messages will load fast without blocking Thunderbird ;-)
• Remove Exif data (image rotation), e.g. with https://www.exifpurge.com/ (courtesy of newsfan, comment 3). Note: this may cause your images to lose the correct orientation. You can restore correct orientation on target system, e.g. using Windows Explorer context menu Rotate left/right on your .jpg files.

Comment 10

[Ryan Lee Sipes]

This can't be backported?

Comment 11

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] (away, back June 30)]

It would be up to m-c release drivers - bug 1732115. I'd say no way at this point in the cycle though.