279312 - Hesitation in compose window when using cut-and-paste, etc., and sometimes crashes

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Roger]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Thunderbird 1.0 on SUSE Linux 9.2 on an Intel PC server (SE7210TP1).  

When I'm composing email, if I do something other than just typing along (like
cut-and-paste or go somewhere else in the email message to make a change) there
will be a multi-second hesitation before the compose window is ready to work
again.  After several seconds the cursor will appear where is has been moved,
and then after a couple more seconds I can do text selection or other editing.

If I do too much while I'm waiting for the compose window to do what I asked it
to do, thunderbird crashes. 

This has not happened to me on my Windows XP system, where I am also happily
using thunderbird. 

I really like thunderbird features, but this behavior on Linux has me looking
for another email agent.  I guess I'll try Mozilla and see if it has this
problem...however, I'm also using Firefox, so I don't want to have to have both
running in order to do email and browsing.

Anyways, this is a *serious* problem.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
This is what I did to get this to happen:

1. Install thunderbird 1.0 on SUSE Linux 9.2.
2. Start using it for email.
3. The above described behavior happened.

i.e. I did nothing special to get this to happen, it just did.

Actual Results:  
Read "Details" above.

Expected Results:  
No hesitations or crashes.

No extensions or themes other than stock.

Comment 1

[Roger]

I just configured Mozilla email (1.7.5) in hopes that it wouldn't have these
problems.  This is also on SUSE Linux 9.2, same Intel server as mentioned earlier.

It has the same hesitation problems, although it hasn't crashed yet.  I expect
that it will at some point.

As I said, Firefox is great, Mozilla email and thunderbird have serious problems
on this platform.

Comment 2

[Adam Hauner]

Roger: Could you provide Talkback incident ID of Thunderbird crash?

Comment 3

[Andrew Brady]

I have reports of this "cut/paste hesitation", from my users, under Mozilla
1.7.3 under SuSE linux 9.1 with KDE-3.2, X-4.3.99. I have no idea to go about
debugging this intermittent problem.

As we are attempting to configure a fixed SuSE image to roll-out to our users,
this is one of things that is holding us up.

Our previous desktop is SuSE7.3 and using exactly the same version of mozilla
with the same user and profile, the problem does not occur. This makes me think
that it is not Mozilla per se, but may be related to the desktop or X.

It is very difficult to debug this as it is intermittent and seems to come and
go. I cannot reproduce it on demand. In fact on my own system using, what
appears to be the same OS and software,  I have not been able to reproduce it at
all, although I have seen it (in the past) I have not seen it for the past two
weeks of use.

Other things that have been seen by my users which may or may not be related to
this...

1) Corruption on paste. Again intermittant. On one past the paste results in
garbled characters, in the next paste (without a new copy) the correct chars are
pasted.
2) hesitation when scrolling.
3) very slow window re-draw.

All of these problems look like it is a problem with load on the systems in
question, but they are unloaded when the problem is occuring.

I would very much appreciate any suggestions in what to try next to diagnose the
underlying problem.

Things I have isolated as not being relevant:

1) Our $HOME is on an NFS dir. I moved the .mozilla onto a desktop local
filesystem but saw no improvement.

2) Quiting other running software to make the system is idle also had no
effect.

3) Disabling the klipper. Effect not confirmed, yet.

Other things I will be trying/considering:

1) A different desktop (FVWM, Gnome).
2) Effects caused by local network services glitches (IMAP, NIS).

Unfortunately, our user environment prohibits rolling out (for example) firefox
and thunderbird as a replacement, so I cannot try to solve it with a change in
user software.

Cheers,

Andy

Comment 4

[Andrew Brady]

Also, this problem for us is not limited to the email composition but also
occurs in form inputs in the browser.

Comment 5

[Andrew Brady]

I believe that the culprit is the KDE clipboard tool, klipper. Try disabling it
in the KDE Panel.

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

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.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.