448496 - Download large numbers of old email in an interleaved way

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, enhancement)

Description

[Michael Moy]

When downloading folders for either offline use or to improve the performance of reading previously viewed emails, performance for sending or reading emails can be very poor. The most common time this is seen is when upgrading to a new machine where a lot of email has to be downloaded to Thunderbird.

A proposed alternative would be to read recent emails and then slow down for older emails so that foreground email operations perform well. One other suggestion would be to load emails from most recent to oldest. I think that emails are loaded in time sequence right now (though I didn't check it).

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

iirc we already do some of this, no?

And as for sending mail, you might want to enable background send. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_3.0_-_New_Features_and_Changes#Send_in_Background

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

on second thought - much has changed in 5 years (though some things have stayed the same) ...

(In reply to Michael Moy from comment #0)
> When downloading folders for either offline use or to improve the
> performance of reading previously viewed emails, performance for sending or
> reading emails can be very poor. The most common time this is seen is when
> upgrading to a new machine where a lot of email has to be downloaded to
> Thunderbird.
> 
> A proposed alternative would be to read recent emails and then slow down for
> older emails so that foreground email operations perform well. 

irving, isn't this already being done, to the extent that it is feasible?  WFM?


> One other suggestion would be to load emails from most recent to oldest. 

iirc this is already done (or partly done) via autosync. WFM?


other things that might help you 
Bug 508276 - IMAP - UI for Skipping Large Attachments (only downloaded on demand)
Bug 482476
bug 506024

Comment 3

[:Irving Reid (No longer working on Firefox)]

There are two steps to synchronizing an IMAP folder. The first step is to retrieve the headers for all messages in the folder; the second step is to copy the bodies of the messages into the offline store (only for folders with offline storage configured).

Synchronizing message bodies to offline storage is supposed to be done when TB is idle at least 10 seconds, and uses all sorts of strategies to limit the size of requests; I'm pretty sure it retrieves newest messages first, and prioritizes inboxes over other folders.

That said, I just created a new connection to an account with lots of messages in the inbox, and TB is having periods of painfully slow response while it downloads and indexes everything in the account, so there's room for improvement.