531206 - Thunderbird indexing fails quietly if the global-messages-db sqlite database is corrupt

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 520139

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[Saul Tannenbaum]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2b1) Gecko/20091029 Firefox/3.6b1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091121 Thunderbird/3.0

A system panic during Thunderbird's absorption of a large, multi-foldered, IMAP account left my global-messages-db.sqlite database corrupt. (This was confirmed with the sqlite analyzer utility which declared the database corrupt).

Subsequent to this corruption, Thunderbird's basic functions were fine. It could send mail and read mail. But, if you watched the status of indexing and downloading via the activity manager, you see Thunderbird sort of stuttering through indexing, and eventually hanging on a particular folder, though at somewhat different points within that folder.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Corrupt your global-messages-db.sqlite file
2.Run Thunderbird
3.
Actual Results:  
Thunderbird functions, but indexing hangs. Multiple relaunchings of the application provide slightly different paths to the eventual hanging of indexing on one particular folder. On a couple of tries, Thunderbird went into the mode of consuming 100% of available CPU.

Expected Results:  
"Thunderbird has found some problems with the index it uses to help you search your messages. Would you like to delete the index and have Thunderbird rebuild it?"

or

As an advanced preference, "Rebuild your search index now" button

I'll note that, if I wasn't actually keeping an eye on the download/indexing that goes with the creation of a new profile for a big account, it might escaped my attention that indexing was hanging. There isn't a lot of visibility into what's going on under the hood and no sense that anything was wrong. Eventually, I imagine I'd try searching for something and either I'd not get the expected results, or I'd see errors. 

Further, there should be documentation on how to recover from this situation. Can one just delete the database and have gloda restart from scratch? Or is state kept somewhere else?

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

> As an advanced preference, "Rebuild your search index now" button

The Folder Properties dialog has a button to rebuild the .msf files, thus
it would be useful to have a corresponding button for rebuilding the Gloda database in the respective block of the Advanced > General preferences.
It should come with a "This will take a while..." warning though.

> Can one just delete the database and have gloda restart from scratch?

Shutting down Thunderbird, deleting global-messages-db.sqlite, and restarting rebuilds the database from scratch, unless anybody knows of adverse effects when doing that (worked for me when testing it).

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

Also see related bug 520139 on another database corruption case.

Comment 3

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

Indeed, this is bug 520139.

If you delete the global-messages-db.sqlite file in your profile, the next time Thunderbird starts it should be fine.

I agree that we want our support documentation to cover this case.  Ideally, we might also have a way for people to report the situation under which their corruption occurred.