487228 - When a repeating event can be set to last longer than the time until the next occurrence. This leads to a massive build up of event bringing the system to a near halt.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 350463

(Calendar :: General, defect)

Description

[northwest.penguin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.18pre) Gecko/20080917 Sunbird/0.9

If I create a new event and misconfigure it I can end up with a huge amount of daily events that can bring lightning/sunbird to its knees.

By setting the end date of the item a year or two into the future and a weekly/daily period of repetition the events begin to overlap.  Each day/week a new occurance of the event added (before the previous occurance finishes) and it is easy to get to a situation where there are 100-200 events in a day which the system cannot handle.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.click new event
2.set the end date 1 or more years in the future (for ex start 4/7/09 end is 4/7/10)
3.set repeat to 'daily' or 'weekly' (any amount smaller than the length of the event)
4.save and close


Actual Results:  
results:
1 event on 4/7/09
2 events on 4/8/09
3 events on 4/9/09
4 events on 4/10/09
5 events on 4/11/09
...

The system is slowed down tremendously.  Trying to view a month or two in the future loads the system almost to the point of overload.

Expected Results:  
The system could warn that the event is set longer than the repetition period.  Or the system could disallow having events longer than the repetition period.  I'm not sure which is the best way.

Comment 1

[northwest.penguin]

Attachment: A simple example of an event being longer than it's repetition period

Comment 2

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

I see no difference to previous reports like Bug 461254 or Bug 485104 about the same issue. Sunbird just displays the events as specified. In addition there already exists several reports about performance issues with many events.

Comment 3

[Bas van den Bosch]

Imho: Wontfix for this one if bug 410427 get fixed, everything will be  much clearer for users then.

Comment 5

[Decathlon]

(In reply to Bas van den Bosch from comment #3)
> Imho: Wontfix for this one if bug 410427 get fixed, everything will be  much
> clearer for users then.

I think this bug is the same of bug 350463.
IMHO I'm not sure that fixing bug 410427 would help so much. The approach of a warning, as reported in bug 350463 comment 2, would be more useful.