227770 - subfolders missing from folder list

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Andreas Mueller]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031026 Firebird/0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031026 Firebird/0.7

I have a large tree of folders and subfolders in my Cyrus IMAP server just
below the INBOX. The top level folder (ablage) contains a subfolder for
each letter of the alphabet. Then within the single letter folders, there
is a folder for each customer. When I open the top level folder, only about
half the folders are displayed. The only way to get Thunderbird to display
a different set of folders is to exit and relaunch. With some luck, the
folders I need are then displayed, otherwise I have to try again.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Build large hiearchy of folders (at least three levels deep), at least
   three hundred folders total.
2. But some random messages in the folders
3. Try to open the hierarchy with Thunderbird

Actual Results:  
some random folders are missing

Expected Results:  
It should have displayed all folders

This is a problem that goes back to the Netscape 4 browser. No Mozilla
release ever was capable of displaying all folders in a large hierarchy
of folders in a Cyrus IMAP Server. I have four Installations of Cyrus
IMAP (various versions), and all Mozilla mail clients between 4.7 and
Thunderbird show this same behaviour.

Comment 1

[Boying Lu]

Attachment: patch v0

The root cause is that when mail cient tries to connect to a IMAP mail server,
it will try to get ACL first ( call nsImapMailFolder::GetAclFlags), which will
in turn call GetDatabase(). In GetDatabase(), for each mail folder it will
evently call morkStdioFile::OpenStdio() to create a corresponding .msf file
locally. But the mail client never close this file after opening it until the
client quits.
So if you have a lot of mail folders on the server side. Evently your mail
client will fail to open all mail folders (i.e. creating corresponding .msf
files). That 's why you fail to view mails under some folder. 

If a .msf is created, the execution path for this folder is different. So your
mail client will create more .msf files next time you launch mail client.
That's why you will get different reults after each launch.

This bug can't be easily re-produced on Linux because the max number of opening
files for a process is 1024. Most people may don't have so much mail folders.

But on solaris, the number is 256. So the bug can be easily re-produced on this
platform.

Comment 2

[Boying Lu]

Comment on attachment 153380 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v0

Can you give r?
thanks

Comment 3

[Boying Lu]

Comment on attachment 153380 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v0

Can you give r thanks

Comment 4

[louis bennett]

Andreas, do you still see this problem with a recent nightly build of Thunderbird?

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 153380 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v0

you can't close db's here - you should only close db's if you opened them...I believe this bug was fixed an other way, in any case.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

=> WFM per David

If you still see this problem please update the bug