Closed Bug 231924 Opened 21 years ago Closed 19 years ago

Close panacea.dat file after each use.

Categories

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

x86
Windows 98
defect
Not set
minor

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED EXPIRED

People

(Reporter: aceman, Assigned: Bienvenu)

References

Details

(Keywords: dataloss)

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031216 Firebird/0.7+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031216 Firebird/0.7+

The file mentioned in the summary is open for a very long time while Mozilla is
running, even though it may not be used often. If Mozilla or the OS crashes (or
the computer locks up even on a ultra stable OS), this file may get corrupted.
When this happens, data in this file is lost (partly because Mozilla recreates
corrupt files from scratch). And users may not able to access their profile
(data) anymore.

The point of this bug is a request to close the file after each usage. Ideally
the file should be closed immediatelly, when the operation is done. For
performance, it would be better to close it only after several seconds, but that
may be difficult to code. Maybe it can be left on the OS cache to handle the
frequent opening and closing of the file.

We can try it now in the 1.7 alpha stage.

See bug 231606 for further details on the general problem.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Blocks: 231606
Keywords: dataloss
the fix for bug 221797 should handle this, at least on win98, and is checked in.
 Mozilla Mail uses this particular file every time you make any change to a
folder (e.g., reading a message, deleting a message, retrieving new mail) so
this file is a poor candiate for closing.
Yes, I found that bug AFTER I filed these, see the meta bug.

It looks like it was checked into 1.6 therefore I will have chance to test it.
Then I will close the bugs it fixes.

> Mozilla Mail uses this particular file every time you make any change to a
>folder (e.g., reading a message, deleting a message, retrieving new mail) so
>this file is a poor candiate for closing.

That's why I proposed the timeout. Another solution could be to cache the
changes in memory until some time (minutes or number of changes) and then open
the file, write them, close it.
I have done some tests in bug 231606, which seem to indicate that it is no
longer necessary to really close the file.

I will not close this bug so far, but will change it to minor until I can be
sure the current implementation is really safe.
Severity: critical → minor
OS: Windows 2000 → Windows 98
Product: MailNews → Core
This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

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This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
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Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 19 years ago
Resolution: --- → EXPIRED
Product: Core → MailNews Core
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