265888 - TB "hangs" when downloading a large number of news headers

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Jeff Houck]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1

I'm downloading the headers from news.povray.org for a research project. TB
becomes "non-responsive" and hangs when I try to get more than 5000+ headers.
There seems to be no problem if the number of headers is below 5000. 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. setup TB news profile for news.povray.org
2. select a group, say povray.newusers
3. download all headers

Actual Results:  
TB becomes non-responsive and requires closure. The upper righthand corner X box
allows TB to be closed with a "this program has become non-responsive" popup box.
If I restart TB, select the same newsgroup and "download all headers", the count
starts from zero again and sometimes will go slightly past the count where it
stopped previously, then goes inop. Repeat as necessary... 
Example: povray.newusers group has 9740 messages. TB "hung" at 6969 headers and
had to be shutdown. I started it again and it reached 7015 then hung.

Expected Results:  
TB should get all the headers from the site. I've used Outlook Express in the
past on this same news server and not had any issues. This is a clean install of
TB 0.8 under XP SP2.

Comment 1

[Michael VanLandingham]

TB version 1.0.2 (20050317)
Mac OS X 10.3.8
Dual G4 1Ghz, 1.5GB SDRAM

I'm seeing the same thing on Mac OS X.  TB will hang (become unresponsive) indefinitely and will 
require a force quit.  Seems to happen around 15000 messages (group has >60k headers), according to 
the info bar on the bottom of TB's window.
Tried a fresh install, same result.  Reproducible: always.

Comment 2

[bugzilla]

I see the same thing on Windows 2000 with Thunderbird 1.0.2 (20050317).  I did
not see this on Windows XP over several sessions (same version and in fact the
newsrc file on this machine was copied from that one), but on this Windows XP
machine it happens every session trying to download headers from alt.callahans (
> 100K headers) -- it stalls around 500-1500 headers downloaded).

Comment 3

[bugzilla]

Sorry, I meant "but on this Windows 2000 machine".

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

is problem gone for you?

WFM  w2k,version 3 alpha 1 (20060911)  XP,version 3 alpha 1 (20061115)