280049 - Thunderbird crashes when selecting the action Compact Folders from the File menu bar

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 278208

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0

Thunderbird on Fedora Core 3 Linux crashes after about 1 minute, when selecting
File->Compact Folders.  On Windows XP, Thunderbird has a memory leak in this
case and keeps going until the system crashes because of exhausted memory.
Right-clicking the Inbox folder and selecting Compact This Folder works
without a problem.
My mail folder tree has a special property:  After many years of work I have
about 2,500 mail folders.  I suspect that this is the triggering factor, since
other Thunderbird users on our systems do not have this problem.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select File->Compact Folders
2. Wait 1-5 minutes while Thunderbird works

Actual Results:  
Thunderbird crashes (Linux).
Thunderbird has a memory leak and exhausts all system memory (Windows XP).

Expected Results:  
The mail folders should have been compacted.

This is likely the same bug as Bugzilla Bug 278208.
However bug 278208 was reported only on Sun Solaris.
Maybe this user also had very many mail folders ?

Comment 1

[Isaac]

I've tested in Solaris 9 and I have more than 500 mail folders for sure (I've
never counted them, maybe 1000 or more) in my mail server.
Hope it helps

Comment 2

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

Right, so your problem on Sun Solaris may also be related to the fact that
you have 1000+ mail folders ?
Actually, it would be a great help if Thunderbird didn't load all mail folder 
subdirectories at startup, but only when you open up the subdirectory, since 
this would save a lot of time (startup takes 1-3 minutes for me).

Additional information: The mail client crash that Thunderbird suffers from 
also occurs when I use Mozilla 1.7.5 on Windows.  However, Mozilla 1.6 on Linux 
doesn't have this problem.  So it seems that the problem may have been 
introduced somewhere between Mozilla 1.6 and 1.7.

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

any talkback reports for this crash?

Comment 4

[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
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Comment 5

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

I've tested this bug again on Thunderbird version 1.0.6-1.4.1.centos4 (20050721),
and Thunderbird still crashes when doing Compact Folders.

Our mail server (Redhat RHEL 4.0) runs the Dovecot IMAP server.
When I submitted the original bug report, we had a different
mail server (RHEL 3.0) with the UW-IMAP server.

I have about 2600 mail folders, and the Compact Folders operation 
generates about 5000 files in Dovecot's .imap/ subdirectories 
before Thunderbird crashes.  I don't know what causes this heavy 
activity.  There's plenty of room in my disk quotas, so the server
side doesn't seem to be at fault.

Comment 6

[timeless]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 278208 ***

Comment 7

[Andrew Williamson [:eviljeff]]

I may be experiencing a similar bug.  I don't get any crash but since the latest release version (version 1.5.0.2 (20060308)) compacting has suddendly started to take a lot longer than previously and the folder is just getting emptied.  

I compacted my Trash when i'd fished out everything with attachments i wanted to keep (usually a relatively quick transaction with just a few hundred text emails left) and after 5 minutes of disk-thrashing i was left with nothing other than an empty trash can.  I checked the folder where the mail and msfs are actually stored  and the 'trash' and 'trash.msf' files had been deleted.  I tried this on a few other folders, this time watching the folder and sometimes no nstmp file was being created.

The only javascript console error was from the compact folder clean up function.