645081 - UI hangs / freezes / unresponsive while checking for new RSS feed items

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[H.H. Nguyen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; de-de) AppleWebKit/533.20.25 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.4 Safari/533.20.27
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; de; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.9

I cannot do anything in Thunderbird while it is checking for and loading new RSS feed items, which it does in regular intervals in my configuration.
Even scrolling does not work until checking has finished, often causing it to scroll where I don't want it to.

This is supposed to be a background task, especially because Thunderbird can be configured to periodically check for new entries and mail can be checked asynchronously as well.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Have like 20-30 RSS / atom feeds
2. Configure Thunderbird to check for new feed items every x minutes
3. Use Thunderbird and watch it freeze and become unresponsive when it checks your feeds
Actual Results:  
Thunderbird freezes completely and does not respond to any user input (mouse scrolling, clicking, keyboard navigation etc.) until all feeds have been checked.


Expected Results:  
Feeds checking should be done independent from UI handling so that it does not block the user interface.


I am using Mac OS X but I guess it is an architectural flaw.

Thunderbird has been exposing this behavior ever since it supported RSS feeds, and it is extremely annoying.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

What's the value of x ?

Does it makes a difference if you start with all add-ons disabled ?


Anything special in the feeds (ie does one of them generates many errors on Tools -> Error console) ?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

H.H.....

(In reply to Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul] from comment #1)
> What's the value of x [where it starts happening]?  [eg. 3, 5, ...]
> 
> Does it makes a difference if you start with all add-ons disabled ?
> 
> 
> Anything special in the feeds (ie does one of them generates many errors on
> Tools -> Error console) ?

and test please using newer version

Comment 3

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE due to lack of response to last question. If you feel this change is in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.