1772337 - All program/network/data operations halt whenever screen is locked

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Bugs Badger]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/102.0.5005.61 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Linux Manjaro XFCE
Thunderbird 91.9.1 (64-bit)

Start any data-related operation in Thunderbird that will take more than a couple of seconds to complete. For example, compose and send a new email with a moderately-sized attachment, or retrieve mail from a mailbox with a large number of new messages. Then lock the screen while the operation is in mid-transit, using either the GUI OS menu or with terminal command 'xflock4'. (If the operation is too quick, it will complete before you have a chance to lock the screen and test.)

Alternatively, (way I discovered the bug), set a mail account to check for new messages every 1 minute, then lock the screen as above. Then send one or more messages to that account from another device, and wait.

After about 5-10 minutes, unlock the screen.

Actual results:

Thunderbird has paused/halted in mid-operation, and not completed the action. The "Sending message" dialog will still be on screen, frozen, and will try to resume after unlock. Or if retrieving mail, it will still be stuck at "retrieving message 14 of 100", wherever it left off when the screen was locked.

If new messages were sent to the account while the screen was locked, they won't be there in the Inbox upon first unlock, even though "check for new mail every 1 minute" was enabled. Instead, they will start to all arrive after the screen is unlocked.

Expected results:

The operations all should have continued/completed while the screen was locked, and be finished once it is unlocked again after 5-10 minutes.

Additional notes:
This issue does NOT occur with other email clients such as Evolution, Seamonkey, Claws etc, and does not occur with Thunderbird 78.9. It also doesn't affect browser operations in Firefox or any other browser. I.e. streaming audio or video from youtube etc continues in background when screen is locked, as expected. So it's not a general O/S locking issue, as it only affects Thunderbird 91.9.1

Comment 1

[Bugs Badger]

This bug is still present in Thunderbird 102.