332808 - messages with attachments take long time to view in 3-pane layout

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Andriy Gapon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060221 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Thunderbird/1.5;version 1.5 (20060222);FreeBSD;U;en-US

I use Thunderbird to access IMAP email account and News account. After upgrading to 1.5 I observe the following problem while reading both email and news messages: when I select a message with at least one attachment it takes a long time to show it in message pane.
The messages without attachments are opened very quickly.
There was no such problem with previous version of Thunderbird.
This bug report is about viewing messages, not saving attachments like few other bug reports (my downloads.rdf is about 20kB).
CPU load jumps to 100% while opening such message.
Message opening time seems to be dependant more on number of attachments rather than their size.
Re-opening a message with attachments that was recently opened has much smaller delay than original opening.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Andriy Gapon]

Attachment: stack traces taken while thunderbird opens a message with many attachments

I attached with gdb and took couple of stack traces while thunderbird was eating CPU when opening a message with dozen attachments.
On the first glance it seems that thunderbird was spinning while trying to get icons for attachments which it displays in "Attachments" sub-pane.
This may be some GNOME thing or some GNOME-on-FreeBSD thing.

Comment 2

[Andriy Gapon]

additionally I executed FreeBSD utility ktrace that allows to trace all system calls and it appears that thunderbird, or rather/maybe GNOME lib code, recursively lists and stats GNOME icon files.

Total number of stat() calls on .png files under /usr/X11R6/share/icons/ is 1,243,263 for a message with 12 attachments (just in case - one forwarded message, 10 jpg files and one shown as unknown), but the total number of unique file stat()-ed is only 1662. And from looking at the trace it seems that the process does one pass on entries under /usr/X11R6/share/icons/gnome/ and then loops over /usr/X11R6/share/icons/hicolor/ entries for hundreds of times.

Comment 3

[Andriy Gapon]

heh, actually the above information made me expriment in the right direction - I ran:
gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/X11R6/share/icons/hicolor/
and after that my messages with attachments are opened very quickly.
Apparently broken/outdated icon-theme.cache file caused that havoc.
So this is definitely not a thunderbird problem, but something of GNOME.
Please close this bug, sorry for the noise.

Comment 4

[Ray Booysen]

Not a thunderbird bug as per reporter's comments.

Andriy, if you're the reporter, you can close your own bugs.

;)