52149 - Scrolling bookmarks tree is absymally slow

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: XUL, defect, P2)

Description

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

FreeBSD 2000091008 (pull/build)
Scrolling bookmarks (Manage bookmarks and sidebar) after importing a 350K
bookmarks file (with many folders, all close) is VERY VERY slow.  2-6 seconds to
respond to a click above or below the slider.  I've seen (and reported) similar
problems with history lists, etc in the past.  I suspect it's all due to issues
with scrolling trees.

Related issue: it also take 3-8 seconds to open the Bookmarks menu.

I'll attach the bookmarks file.

Comment 1

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Attachment: my ns4.7 bookmarks file

Comment 2

[Peter Trudelle]

Although I have a similar bookmarks file, and would love to see this fixed soon,
this is an edge case, and will probably affect less than 1% of users, so it is
not a good place to spend our time. This will probably impove due to general
tree speedups.
->future, helpwanted.

Comment 3

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Note: with a 26K (~185 URL) bookmarks file (which is smaller than most
peoples!), scrolling in Manage Bookmarks takes about 1-2 seconds per click. 
Faster, but still very slow.  (PIII 450 w/ 256MB).  Using the slider is painful
due to the jerky updates.

Also, while bookmarks may not _too_ often get that large (I'd think more than
1%), History lists can be VERY large.

Comment 4

[Peter Trudelle]

Your metrics are a lot higher than mine, even measured on my lowly PII-366.  I
thought BSD was supposed to be fast? In any case, there is no History Menu, so
we don't get the worst case, and the History Window is not considered an
often-used feature. My bookmarks menu is considered to be very exceptional,
catching many bugs that nobody else reported or could reproduce. Some of these
operations are not going to be quick in 6.0, but there are workarounds to
improve things, like using pgUp/pgDn 

Comment 5

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

FYI, PgUp/Down is the same speed as clicking above and below the slider - ~4
seconds on my large-bookmark example, ~1.5-2 seconds on the small example (185
URL's - most of which are in the "standard" folders) - I only had about 40-50 at
the visible level.)

Comment 6

[Peter Trudelle]

4 seconds per click?  Are you measuring or estimating?

Comment 7

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Measuring.
I just did a test in Manage bookmarks (default size; about 20-25 lines).  Scroll
time was 3.0-4.2 seconds per click, averaging ~3.6.  I opened it up to ~40-45
lines, and it takes 8.5-9.5 seconds per click....

In the History window (which is a little taller), it's 2.25-2.5 per click (no
folders to deal with though).  I sized it even larger (from ~33 to ~45 lines)
and the scroll time went up to 3.4 seconds per click.  At 6.5 lines, scroll time
is ~0.5 seconds.  Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Comment 8

[Peter Trudelle]

What hardware, OS, etc?

Comment 9

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE 20000910xx (pull/build).  GCC 2.95.2
PIII-450, 256MB ram, 8GB IDE drive.
XFree86 3.3.5, TNT2 video card (Viper 770 I think)

.mozconfig:
# sh
# Build configuration script
#
# See http://www.mozilla.org/build/unix.html for build instructions.
#

# Options for 'configure' (same as command-line options).
ac_add_options --disable-pedantic
ac_add_options --with-pthreads
ac_add_options --enable-xterm-updates
ac_add_options --enable-debug

Comment 10

[Peter Trudelle]

cc bryner & pavlov.  Any idea why this is so much slower on FreeBSD?  Do you 
know of anyone we could assign this to?

Comment 11

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

for [e-mail]: could you try this with the bookmarks file above
under FreeBSD?  Or point the people here at your freebsd machine so they can try
it?

Comment 12

[David Hyatt]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 53051 ***

Comment 13

[Peter Trudelle]

reopening. This bug is specific to the bookmarks tree on BSD.

Comment 14

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

I should note that this appears to affect all trees, not just bookmarks (though
bookmarks shows it more).  History, for example, shows the same exponential
slowdown on larger windows.

Note that the fix for 53051 and 53091 doesn't solve this problem.

Useful tests needed: check on Linux, and run in a profiler with a LARGE
bookmarks window.

Comment 15

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

I finally got my Win32 dailys working again and checked there.  The exponential
slowdown with larger windows IS present under Win32 2000092708, but the base
time is much faster, so a large window takes ~1sec to page up/down while a small
window is absolutely instantaneous, as best I can tell.

Setting OS->all, platform->all

Still looking for profile data.  Anyone?

Comment 16

[Akkana Peck]

This tree scrolling slowness also makes the mail thread pane painful to use.

Comment 17

[Chuck R.]

Build: 20001030. 
I cannot drag/move bookmarks inside the folder "Imported IE favorites". My old 
bookmarks file had about 500 bookmarks. This is on win 98, Pentium III-450, 
256MB ram. 

Also, there is no hourglass to indicate that Mozilla is doing something. An 
hourglass would be nice so the user won't frantically click away at other 
features while Mozilla is doing something, thus preventing Mozilla or the user 
from getting confused and/or doing something they didn't want. 

Comment 18

[Claudius Gayle]

*** Bug 61643 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 19

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

FreeBSD 4.1  20010206xx

A quick re-check since I have a optimize no-debug build around.

It appears that lazy instantiation of treecells works - page-down on a large
window takes 1.2s initially, 0.7s the second time.

Timing appears to be closer to or even below  linear with the number of lines in
the window.  large-size (50) line window takes around 1.2-1.4 seconds, mid-size
(25) takes about 0.7 seconds, and small (10) takes .5 seconds.  NOTE: this is
with a much smaller bookmarks file!  I'll retry with a larger one.

I have not re-checked in History because it appears to be broken.

Comment 20

[David Hyatt]

Reassigning to ben, who can fix this by converting to outliner.

Comment 21

[Peter Trudelle]

clearing future target

Comment 22

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

Outliner isn't coming for beta, marking nsbeta1-

Comment 23

[Cathleen]

*** Bug 72762 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 24

[Cathleen]

this depends on bug 73508 getting bookmark converted to use outliner widget.

Comment 25

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

The BookmarksOutliner branch (rotted a little now, hoping to get back to it in 
the next week or so) was showing scrolling speeds in my debug build faster than 
that of my 6.1 optimized. Setting P2.

Comment 26

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

outliner fixes this, pretty much. 

Comment 27

[Blake Ross]

bookmarksliner is landing in --> 0.9.7.

Comment 28

[Blake Ross]

fixed.