Closed Bug 378708 Opened 17 years ago Closed 16 years ago

Losing IMAP-Server connection during night time

Categories

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

x86
Windows XP
defect
Not set
critical

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: bugzilla, Assigned: mscott)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Build Identifier: Version 2.0.0.0 (20070326)

Running Thunderbird 2 german on an athlon dual machine with 3 GB RAM. Thunderbird has configured 7 imap accounts on a local linux/postix/courier mail server. The pc is a 24/7 admin workstation so Thunderbird is running all the time. Normal working hours are from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Since I have upgraded Thunderbird from 1.5 to 2.0 on monday Thunderbird loses the connection to the imap server sometime between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. There are no error messages like "lost connection to imap server" or something, it just doesn´t show the new emails in the in-folder. Timeout errors pop up when I try to change to any other folder / account on the server. When you quit Thunderbird the application closes but the process still shows up in the windows task manager. After quiting it there and restarting Thunderbird everything is ok.
There are no energy savings activated on the workstation nor has any other workstation / server component been updated. 8 workstations with Thunderbird 1.5, with 3 up to 8 configured imap accounts doesn´t show this behavior.
There are no scheduled scripts running on the workstation.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Configure multiple(?) imap accounts.
2. Create some filters to sort some mailing lists into subfolders (like postfix list)
3. Wait
Actual Results:  
Lost connection

Expected Results:  
Show / sort incomming mail

System is Windows XP SP 1, workstation has 2 Athlon mp 2200+ with a total of 3 GB RAM.
There are no installed extensions. Same setup works since Thunderbird 1.0 without any failures.
(In reply to comment #0)
> There are no error messages like "lost connection to imap server" or something,
> it just doesn´t show the new emails in the in-folder.
> Timeout errors pop up when I try to change to any other folder / account on the
> server.
> When you quit Thunderbird the application closes but the process still shows up
> in the windows task manager.
> After quiting it there and restarting Thunderbird everything is ok.

Sounds hang up of internal processing of IMAP access or hang up of something which interfere with IMAP access.
Do you have enough disk space? If yes, get IMAP protocol log to help problem analysis by developers.
 - http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/mail-troubleshoot.html#imap
 - http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/http-debugging.html
"SET NSPR_LOG_MODULES=imap:5" is sufficient for initial analysis.

(1) Log of normal access
    -  Set environment variable, start Thunderbird, access to IMAP servers,
       then terminate Thunderbird and save log file.
(2) Log from start to error
    - Set environment variable, and start Thunderbird at 8 a.m.
    - When error is encountered, try IMAP access several times, in order to
      force log of error to be written to log file(log data is buffered).
    - Try to terminate TB => Not terminate => Kill Tb => Save log file

Log file of (2) will be very very large. If you can reduce log, please reduce or split it, and please find last normal access to IMAP and first error access to IMAP. And attach log file of (1) and required log files of (2) to this bug, please. (mime-type=text/plain if bugzilla accepts file size, or zip/tar.gz and so on if still very large)

JFY.
Bug 307527 exists when dual-core PC & MS Win. But it's already bypassed by patch although the bug is not closed as FIXED yet. And Bug 307527 doesn't looks to have relation to your problem, although possibility of something wrong during 8p.m. to 11p.m. when dual-core is not ZERO(workload of server usually becomes low).
> Sounds hang up of internal processing of IMAP access or hang up of something
> which interfere with IMAP access.
> Do you have enough disk space? If yes, get IMAP protocol log to help problem
> analysis by developers.
5 GB should be enough hopefully, will turn it on.

> Log file of (2) will be very very large. If you can reduce log, please reduce
> or split it

I´ll try my very best.

Greetings,

  Mike
Bug 378813 reports "unresponsive" problem when IMAP with Tb 2.0, and it refers to Bug 320515 Comment #5 (90-100% CPU, IMAP).
Is CPU utilization of Thunderbird high when problem is encountered?
Additional comment on log file attach.
Log contains server name, mail address, folder name and so on. These are sensitive information in many cases - spammer can use for spam target, and folder name may be confidential data such as new product name.
Please replace such data by string like aaa@bbb.ccc with keeping consistency in log file(s), if they should be hidden.
> Additional comment on log file attach.
> Log contains server name, mail address, folder name and so on. These are
> sensitive information in many cases
I´ll keep that in mind. By murphy´s law, Thunderbird behaves very well this morning. I´ll keep it going, log file is at 200 MB. Is there any size of this log file to worry about? At this rate I would be able to log another 20 days.
(In reply to comment #5)
My experience says Murphy's law is always/forever correct when software test :-)
> Is there any size of this log file to worry about?
1. Disk space requirement is 2*log_file_size if splited.
2. Some tools hold whole data in memory, then huge memory size.
   I usually use $Array=file($FileName); to read a file easily when PHP script.
   It holds all file lines in an array, then huge virtual memory if huge file.
   Please be careful.

JFY.
I met Bug 375375 a little while ago. This kind of problem, internal forever wait in multi-threading, can cause phenomenon you are experiencing.
So, back after four days at the office site Thunderbird is running fine and has produced a 1 GB log file. Seems like something has changed but I can´t figure out what it is. I´ve restarted Thunderbird to create a new log file. If nothing happens during the week I´ll report on friday.

Greetings,

 Mike
Mike is this still working for you?
Version: unspecified → 2.0
Sorry for this long timeout, it just jumped out of my mind. No, sorry, the only way to keep Thunderbird from crashing is to activate the debugging feature. After I had deactivated the debugging Thunderbird started crashing again after 2 or 3 days and that´s still his rhythm. After some time I turned on debugging for ten days or so and the crashing went away... My Thunderbird is now 2.0.0.6 and there are still no plugins installed.
is it a wireless system
No, just a simple GB connection, intel desktop pro. No energy savings activated, the board doesn´t support them well. Our zabbix system doesn´t show any special things, no processes starting, no high cpu usage, no high memory useage. Doesn´t matter if Thunderbird runs visible in front or minimized to the windows bar.
(In reply to comment #9)
> the only way to keep Thunderbird from crashing is to activate the debugging feature.
> After I had deactivated the debugging Thunderbird started crashing again after
> 2 or 3 days and that´s still his rhythm.

Does your "debugging feature" mean "NSPR logging"?
Does your "crashing" means phenomenon in your comment #0?
I assume both are yes.

Bug 380342 Comment #6 says that similar timeout issue disappeared when disabled "Show an alert of email notification".
I'm also experiencing similar situation in multiple POP3 accounts environment.
  Seamonkey Mail&News shortly freezes(not respond until alert is displayed)
  when several 10 mails(all are spam) are being downloaded at an account.
To Mike(bug opener):
Can disabling of "Show alert" be a workaround?
> I assume both are yes.
Yes, still the first described behavior.
> Can disabling of "Show alert" be a workaround?
Yes, "Show alert" is activated, I will disable it now and see what happens.
It still crashes but not at the high frequency as before. First crash occurs after some days while the next time was around 2 weeks later. It seems to be related to the "show alert" option. Still the same behavior with the last Thunderbird version, still no extensions installed beside the german dictionary.  
Mike: I assume you are using Thunderbird 2. Are you willing to try Thunderbird 3.0a1?

Gerv
Gerv: Sorry, I had allready forgotten about this post. Well the error went away after changing our imap server from Courier 3 to the latest dovecot version. While it´s still the same old hardware on server side and client side and also all the old maildirs were migrated I would believe it´s the faster response time of dovecot what fixes the issue. On the other hand I really leak any knowledge about the deeper imap protocol formats, so it´s only a guess.
> Are you willing to try Thunderbird 3.0a1?
Sorry, no alpha software with arond 10 production accounts ;-). And I don´t think that a simple test account would show the same problems.
So thanks for all your help, feel free to contact me for any further informations.

Mike
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 16 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
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