1867219 - UI delays at all times, even when just entering text with Gnome + Wayland

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[winrootkit]

Attachment: Screencast from 2023-11-06 14-12-02.webm

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

All UI interactions hang for up to 3 seconds in relatively close intervals which makes it a struggle to use Thunderbird at all.
Happening on current Ubuntu 23.10
Thunderbird Version 115.5.0

Actual results:

The UI freezes and even inputs are freezing (text) the UI then catches up after unfreezing but e.g. when typing text, it is not always "catching" up in the correct order.

Expected results:

I would expect Thunderbird to run smoothly on a computer with 42 GB of RAM and an 8-core CPU.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

What desktop are you using on Ubuntu?
This is happening mainly (or always?) during message compose?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Does this also happen with Help > Troubleshoot Mode?

Comment 3

[winrootkit]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #1)

What desktop are you using on Ubuntu?
This is happening mainly (or always?) during message compose?

It happens in any UI element, I just recorded text entry for privacy reasons.
It is as if the whole application freezes.

I am using Gnome 45.1 on Wyaland..(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #2)

Does this also happen with Help > Troubleshoot Mode?

Yes the behaviour also exists in troubleshoot mode. The whole UI cyclically hangs for some moments and then works again. I have at least one colleague who also experiences this issue.

Comment 4

[winrootkit]

Since it has been silent and Thunderbird is almost unusable for us.

Is there anything I can do to find the issue?

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to winrootkit from comment #4)

Since it has been silent and Thunderbird is almost unusable for us.

Is there anything I can do to find the issue?

Thanks for asking. Install Thunderbird from https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ and please create a performance profile https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiling-thunderbird-performance. Thanks

Comment 6

[winrootkit]

I will create a performance profile as soon as I return to work (vacation until Thursday).

Comment 7

[winrootkit]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2024-01-04 09-19-04.png

Comment 8

[winrootkit]

This is the profile shared on our corporate cloud: https://cloud.ucware.com/s/adYwsdFRHFrPzE2

Comment 9

[winrootkit]

You can clearly see the high CPU load in the graphs and also the corresponding lag in the screenshot series.
I was continuously typing aways.

Comment 10

[winrootkit]

Attachment: Thunderbird 2024-01-04 09.41 profile.json.gz

I updated to today's build.

Comment 11

[Nick Brown]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #5)

(In reply to winrootkit from comment #4)

Since it has been silent and Thunderbird is almost unusable for us.

Is there anything I can do to find the issue?

Thanks for asking. Install Thunderbird from https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ and please create a performance profile https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiling-thunderbird-performance. Thanks

On it....

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

winrootkit, thanks for the profiles. Both show significant GC/CC memory activity following graphics activity, which matches your description of comment 0.

So the question is, is Thunderbird causing this, or is fault related to core graphics?

Comment 13

[Nick Brown]

Further feedback.
Resizing the column widths (eg inbox changing width of subject - from - recipient) takes upwards of a minute to complete.
Couple of other places where it is a bit sluggish (but don't recall where - when I remember I'll post here).
Otherwise the performance seems to be ok now.
My machine has a spinning disk so uses swap space, 16G RAM. This isn't a swapping out problem by any chance?

Comment 14

[winrootkit]

My machine has 48 GB of RAM an an NVMe drive, so that's certainly not an issue.
It's also a AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, so I would not expect CPU, RAM or disk IO to be an issue here.
Not to the extend I have been experiencing, which is making Thunderbird unusable in most situations and also makes GNOME's "Thunderbird" is not responding pop-up appear.

Comment 15

[Nick Brown]

(In reply to winrootkit from comment #14)

My machine has 48 GB of RAM an an NVMe drive, so that's certainly not an issue.
It's also a AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, so I would not expect CPU, RAM or disk IO to be an issue here.
Not to the extend I have been experiencing, which is making Thunderbird unusable in most situations and also makes GNOME's "Thunderbird" is not responding pop-up appear.

Rich persons' stuff then !!
So am I right in saying that TB is multi-threading? So somewhere the timeslicing has gone adrift?
Or TB talking to Wayland?
Or something in Wayland itself? (unlikely otherwise loads of bugs would be popping up, unless there is a little-used feature that TB decided to use and is problematic...)
Very busy RAM suggests some memory gobbling-up thing going on (technical description)
Back to the developers.

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Nick Brown from comment #13)

Further feedback.
Resizing the column widths (eg inbox changing width of subject - from - recipient) takes upwards of a minute to complete.

That's great info. Please file a new bug report with https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiling-thunderbird-performance.

Comment 17

[winrootkit]

Any news on this one?

The issue still persists...

Comment 18

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

possible duplicate of bug 1875103

Comment 19

[darkmaniels]

I think this is a bigger issue than bug 1875103. As several folks have mentioned here and in other forums, this issue affects many different aspects of using TB, not just deleting or moving messages. For me I notice it the most just trying to open my calendar. If I'm in the Mail tab and I click on the Calendar tab (either on the top or in the new side bar), it takes several seconds before the UI switches to the calendar. Interestingly, switching back to the Mail tab is instantaneous. I'm running Debian Testing, with 16GB of RAM and a 10th-gen i7 processor, with Wayland.

Comment 20

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

winrootkit,
When this is happening, is new mail being actively received?

Comment 21

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

When this is happening, is new mail being actively received?

winroot, also,if you using imap and are able, please try beta https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/beta/

(In reply to darkmaniels from comment #19)

For me I notice it the most just trying to open my calendar. If I'm in the Mail tab and I click on the Calendar tab (either on the top or in the new side bar), it takes several seconds before the UI switches to the calendar. Int

Then you are likely seeing a different issue.

Comment 22

[darkmaniels]

I switched to a different distro (Pop_OS) a few weeks ago and seeing your reply just now made me realize that I haven't encountered the problem since then. Currently on 115.11.0 and all's well, thanks.

Comment 23

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to darkmaniels from comment #22)

I switched to a different distro (Pop_OS) a few weeks ago and seeing your reply just now made me realize that I haven't encountered the problem since then. Currently on 115.11.0 and all's well, thanks.

Still good for you on Pop_OS, after leaving debian?

Comment 24

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Does this reproduce with version 128?

Comment 25

[Nick Brown]

Update. TB v 115.12.2
Ubuntu 24.04 (LTS) (after machine melt-down on 22.04)
Still seeing this when changing column width or row height

Comment 26

[darkmaniels]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #23)

(In reply to darkmaniels from comment #22)

I switched to a different distro (Pop_OS) a few weeks ago and seeing your reply just now made me realize that I haven't encountered the problem since then. Currently on 115.11.0 and all's well, thanks.

Still good for you on Pop_OS, after leaving debian?

Yes, thanks. Still no problems since I switched to Pop a few months ago.

Comment 27

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #20)

winrootkit,
When this is happening, is new mail being actively received?

winrootkit, how is version 128 ?

Comment 28

[winrootkit]

There is no 128 released for Ubuntu it seems.

Comment 29

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to winrootkit from comment #28)

There is no 128 released for Ubuntu it seems.

should be now.

Comment 30

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard