537940 - Feature Request: Display only the first few lines of very long emails

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 890457

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[Karanbir Singh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009091106 CentOS/3.0.14-1.el5.centos Firefox/3.0.14
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091223 Shredder/3.0.1pre

When clicking on a large emails like logwatch reports or threads that have been going to and fro amongst a large number of people, thunderbird will take a very long time to display the complete text. In some cases, this could be as much as 45 seconds before the email comes up ( eg: logwatch report email which is 118 KiB in size ). During this waiting time, the entire Thunderbird UI is unavailable. In cases like this, thunderbird could potentially only display the first chunk ( perhaps 100 lines ) of the email, with a UI button that allows people to view the complete email if they chose to do so.




Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Recieve large email ( greater than 100 KiB in text )
2. Click on email in INBOX.
3. Thunderbird appears to freeze, with CPU utilisation growing to 100% of a cpu core
Actual Results:  
When it does return, the entire email body is rendered into the mail preview pane.

Expected Results:  
Only the first chunk of the email should be displayed, with the User getting an option to view the entire email if they so desire.

The machine I am using at the moment has 8gb of ram and is a dual core opteron; with load averages well under 0.5. Running io performance monitors indicates that its not an i/o bandwidth issue either, however thunderbird will sit at 100% utilisation of one cpu core while it tries to render the email.

I am using IMAP with offline support enabled. Issue persists even when loading an email that has already been downloaded and cached earlier.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

xref bug 307070