310704 - hang after downloading and sorting large newsgroup

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Brian Wilkins]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412.5
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.5 Beta 1 (20050908)

I subscribed to the "microsoft.public.windows.inetexplorer.ie6.browser" news group because I needed 
to find the answere to a display bug in IE6 (no, I don't use IE, but I have to test my web site designs in 
it). There were over 200,000 headers in the group. The headers were downloaded fine, but when I tried 
to sort by Date, Thunderbird stopped responding and I had to do a Force Quit. Afterwards, whenever I 
opened Thunderbird, it would eventually hang even if I didn't try to view the news group. I was able to 
fix the problem by deleting the specific newsgroups .dat and .msf file. Doing that cleared the 
downloaded headers, so I was able to start from the beginning. This time, I only downloaded 500 
headers. Seems to work fine now.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. After setting up your news server, subscribe to "microsoft.public.windows.inetexplorer.ie6.browser" or 
any other news group with over 200,000 headers.
2. After downloading the headers, try to sort by Date.
3. Thunderbird should hang at this point.

Actual Results:  
Thunderbird stopped responding and had to force quit.

Expected Results:  
Should have sorted the news headers

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

Thunderbird version of Suite bug 241963?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Brian, Can you try this with a newer version?

200k might be slow based on my testing below, but not sure where to get one with 200k to test.

TB version 3 alpha 1 (20060823)
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general 45k took 25MB memory to load and ~30 seconds to sort
microsoft.public.excel.misc with 30k took 10MB memory but was not even a blip in time
(ie6 only had 6k)

Comment 3

[Brian Wilkins]

I've tested the Mac version of Thunderbird 2.0b1 using the same microsoft newsgroup. It downloaded the headers, but after 1 hour and 15 minutes, it has still not displayed the list of headers. There are almost 260,000 headers that were downloaded, but never displayed. This time around I never had "Not Responding," so it was still working, but it's taking too long.

Comment 4

[Brian Wilkins]

Good news! I tried it again, this time with the Mac version 3 alpha 1 (20061206) and it worked. It took about 5 minutes to get the headers and display them. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me considering there were almost 260,000 headers. 

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks Brian.
closing WFM per comment 4