191890 - compact folders hang

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 90452

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

Description

[patrick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212

I receive LOTS of email and rarely compact folders or empty my trash folder.
However whenever I do get round to compacting my folders the email client starts
working and after 1 minute or so it hangs. Email and browser windows don't
refresh or respond, even after 30 minutes or so. Top reports that mozilla is
using all the CPU and ltrace does not show any library calls, seemingly
indicating an infinte local loop. The only way to recover from this is to kill
mozilla (SIGKILL). Then all works fine again except a new email folder called
nstmp (and nstmp1, nstmp2 after successive attempts to compact) appears.
The only way I can get the mail client to compact my email is to first empty my
trash box (could easily contain 100s of MB of data).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:





My system is a dual pentium 500 with 512M RAM running linux and my email folders
are on a linux NFS drive.

Comment 1

[esther]

This sounds like a dup of a fixed bug, not sure why you would see this with the
build dated 20021212.  You may have a scenerio not tested yet.  Please see bug
173399 and 70322 to see if your sceario is similiar.  What I notice about your
scenrio that is not mentioned in any of the fixed bugs is your folders are on a
remote drive instead of local.  If possible, could you try this with a nightly
build.

Comment 2

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

Could be a dup of 90452

Comment 3

[patrick]

90452 looks like the same bug to me. 173399 does not sound similar to me. 70322
appears to be a side effect of this bug (which ends up leaving nstmp folders
which I delete manually).

Since I reported the bug I have been compacting my folders more often, and this
bug does not occur all the time. The smaller the total mail the more likely a
compact will end successfully.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

Have you tried this with a 1.5 Mozilla or Thunderbird build? Compact has been
sped up a great deal.

Comment 5

[patrick]

I use mozilla for work and would rather not use beta builds. When it is released
I shall try it.

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

When you try 1.5 final, you should set the following pref:

user_pref("mail.thread_without_re", false);

either by using about:config, or shutting down mozilla and editing prefs.js by
hand. This will cause messages with the same subject but no Re: or references to
be put in separate threads, but it will also speed up reparsing and compact
enormously.

Comment 7

[David :Bienvenu]

dup of bug 90452

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 90452 ***