684554 - Activity Manager sorting incorrectly

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 493819

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Mitra Ardron]

Attachment: Screenshot of activity manager

Either Activity Manager is ordering things strangely OR its got some (IMHO) weird design decisions embedded in it. 

See the attachment, items are grouped, then sorted in ascending order (descending would be more usual). 

Also ... it looks like ongoing activities - like slow downloads - are listed by start time rather then end time.

Comment 1

[Hashem Masoud]

(In reply to Mitra Ardron from comment #0)
> Also ... it looks like ongoing activities - like slow downloads - are listed
> by start time rather then end time.

Quoting from this page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Thunderbird/Activity_Manager

"An active process is always displayed at the top of the Activity Manager window. Once a process is finished it can convert to an event and then is sorted in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest) with other events. If a process is in the "try again" state it is sorted above active processes. A process in the "waiting for input state" is sorted above everything else."

The page is outdated but the concept is still the same in Thunderbird. I don't think this is a bug.

Comment 2

[Mitra Ardron]

Hashem -  That description sounds reasonable ... 

But did you look at the screenshot  - or look at your Activity Manager window sometime - it doesn't match that description at all - often events are not sorted correctly, and often a process is buried multiple scrolls down the screen.

Comment 3

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Mitra are you refereing to 7:45 and the duplicate Junk to junk message move ?

Comment 4

[Mitra Ardron]

Attachment: Screenshot of activity manager #2

Notice reverse ordering of events - newest should be on top

Comment 5

[Mitra Ardron]

Hi Ludovic

No - I presume that is really 3 events all occuring during that minute (as it fetched mail). 

Up at the top you have three events with "stamp" icons, the earlier 5:29 ones appear above the 8:29 when they should be below it, (they are all events).  I've just posted another attachement, where events even of the same type are sorted in the opposite order. (most recent should be on top according to the post Hashem found). 

But its not consistently in the reverse order either, active events - still downloading a lot of mail for example, often appear in the middle of the list (far enough down that you have to scroll for them) but not at the bottom. 

This is NOT an unusal bug, I think if any of you look at your activity window and check the sorting you'll see its not even close to being correct. 

(Note bug needs confirming - so would be good for someone else to do this!)

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

They are indeed grouped, with alerts and errors sticking at the top. 
And I haven't seen any time ordering problem on my system.
In short, I don't see anything I'd consider to be out of spec.

Do you still see this?
And if you do, please annotate your screen shot with text.

Comment 7

[Mitra Ardron]

Ok - looking at this a bit more clearly. 

1: Alerts & Errors stick at the top, with normal events below that.
2: Alerts are sorted most recent at bottom; 
3: Normal events most recent at top
4: Current items - e.g. an attempt to connect are not shown.

To repeat it, (on a laptop) - turn wireless off, click Online to force TB to be online.  

Error #1: Click on a few folders - this will generate errors
Wait till clock ticks to next minute and click on some more.
This will show the incorrect ordering of Alerts 

Error #2: Click "Get Mail" (which will take a while to fail, and should show up during that time - it doesnt). 

I also believe showing alerts above current actions is a mistake, to illustrate reconnect wireless, click on a folder - the error shows at the top, the successes below, which gives the indication that things are failing when in fact they are now working again.