Open Bug 1901546 Opened 9 months ago Updated 5 months ago

comcast connection failures cause flood of "Login to server ---- with username ---- failed." which are hard to get rid of and Tbird is partially unusable due to high system memory ~8gb. (pop)

Categories

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
General
Version:
Thunderbird 115
Platform:
Unspecified
Linux
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: barry.abel, Unassigned)

References

(Blocks 1 open bug)

Details

(Keywords: memory-leak, stalled, Whiteboard: [needs testing on version 128])

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I had Thunderbird set to check my accounts every 5 minutes. I stepped away from my computer for several hours, and the ISP that several of them are on appears to have been having problems accepting logins for quite some time.
This occurred in Thunderbird 115.11.0 on Manjaro Xfce.

Actual results:

When I returned to the computer, dozens of the following messages were on my screen: "Login to server ---- with username ---- failed." Dismissing individual messages was difficult until I got the messages in the proper sequence, and system memory usage was dangerously high on my computer that has only 8 GB of RAM. Even once I managed to dismiss all of the messages, the following was happening:

  1. Clicking on a different folder in the folder pane didn't cause the new folder's messages to appear, although the folder's name was selected.
  2. I couldn't open a new Thunderbird window, tab, or even Help-About dialog box.
  3. Exiting Thunderbird caused the Thunderbird window to disappear, but the Task manager showed that the program was still active several minutes later, until I rebooted the computer.

In a silver lining, I was at least able to scroll through the list of folders to see which had new messages, so that I could write them down and check them when I restarted Thunderbird.

Expected results:

Well, clearly not the above. A balance needs to be struck between prompting for feedback if the user is present and preserving functioning of the program and the system if the user isn't responding to the prompts for action.

Component: Untriaged → General
OS: Unspecified → Linux
Summary: Seemingly unlimited messages about login failure stress system memory, are hard to get rid of, and leave Tbird partially disabled → comcast connection failures cause flood of "Login to server ---- with username ---- failed." which are hard to get rid of and leave Tbird partially disabled. High system memory. (pop)
See Also: → 1789623
Keywords: perf:resource-use

Is it happening in version 128?

Flags: needinfo?(barry.abel)

Also, if you change the mail check interval to something like 15, does the rate of memory increase change?

Keywords: perf:resource-use → memory-leak
See Also: → 1889488
Whiteboard: [closeme 2024-10-01]

system memory usage was dangerously high

How much memory was Thunderbird using?

Blocks: 1330872

FWIW, just closed bug 1789623

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

Is it happening in version 128?

I don't know. Manjaro hasn't updated to 128 yet, and I haven't experienced any connection failures recently.

Sorry for the delayed response; I'm catching up on my email now after a long trip.

Flags: needinfo?(barry.abel)

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #2)

Also, if you change the mail check interval to something like 15, does the rate of memory increase change?

I would expect so, but this fortunately isn't an easy bug to test, at least not as reported. Connection failures are uncommon, and having one happen when I've been away from my computer for several hours would be even more uncommon.

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #3)

system memory usage was dangerously high

How much memory was Thunderbird using?

I don't recall the exact amount, but my system's Task Manager was showing that nearly all memory was being used. I don't know how much memory each connection failure message uses, but since my system has only 8 GB of RAM, and the messages may have been appearing for hours, I wasn't surprised by the high memory use. Instead, my concern was that Thunderbird didn't have a limit on how many connection failure messages it would send, since the user can't be expected to be at the computer at all times.

If you are able to run a daily build from https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/daily/ please obtain a Thunderbird performance profile using https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiling-thunderbird-performance with "Native Allocations" enabled at step 4.5. ("Native Allocations" is only available on dailyi)

Keywords: stalled
Summary: comcast connection failures cause flood of "Login to server ---- with username ---- failed." which are hard to get rid of and leave Tbird partially disabled. High system memory. (pop) → comcast connection failures cause flood of "Login to server ---- with username ---- failed." which are hard to get rid of and Tbird is partially unusable due to high system memory ~8gb. (pop)
Whiteboard: [closeme 2024-10-01] → [needs testing on version 128]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #8)

If you are able to run a daily build from https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/daily/ please obtain a Thunderbird performance profile using https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiling-thunderbird-performance with "Native Allocations" enabled at step 4.5. ("Native Allocations" is only available on dailyi)

I'm not sure who you're addressing this to, but if it's me, it's important that I use a stable version of Thunderbird.

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