521241 - session not restored after hang

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I had two tabs, an imap folder and newsgroup folder. After shutdown, which hung with no cpu usage), and restart I only had one tab. Didn't attempt to reproduce.

2009-10-10 build. I assume this was related to the hang, because I've not seen sessions not restored. But I don't currently suspect regression.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

perhaps my problem is related to bug 354894

Comment 2

[Rain [:rain1] (inactive)]

Doubt it. I understand the sessionstore file's only written out on a proper shutdown.

Comment 3

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Yeah, in order to avoid session restores creating endless cycles of hangs, I initially made it only write to the session store when normally closing the 3-pane.  So this behavior is 'correct'.  That worst-case scenario could be avoided by setting a flag in the JSON file or simply deleting the session store when we attempt to restore so that if the restore fails, the next time Thunderbird starts we ignore the state.

In general, Thunderbird has not been very crashy so I don't think this has been a big issue.

Comment 5

[Adam]

This is a problem for me not so much because of crashes (as you say, TB is pretty stable), but because it also causes tabls to be lost when clicking the "Restart" button after a TB or add-on update, or when TB is shut down because Windows is shutting down.

I think dealing with this the same way Firefox does would be a good approach - reload the tabs if the option is set, always. And prevent crash loops by detecting a repeat crash, and bringing up a dialog asking wheher to open the tabs or not, perhaps with a check next to each, for when the user knows which message is the problem.

Comment 6

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Bug 408338 has landed and I believe fixes this problem sufficiently on both fronts.  The session is automatically persisted in the background on a timer and when I restarted Thunderbird via the add-on manager the state got persisted correctly.