812925 - All time-consuming tasks freeze the whole UI until complete

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[matteo sisti sette]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11

Steps to reproduce:

Any time-consuming task like for example:
- copy or move a large number of messages
- save a message that has big attachments
- saving big messages to disk just after downloading


Actual results:

The whole UI freezes. In some cases it even shows up the popup "A script is making this page unresponsive".

It looks like as if everything in TB was implemented as a monolythic one-thread program where every time consuming task blocks the application completely. (only exception seems to be network communication with the server, well, if even that was blocking it would be embarassing).



Expected results:

Time-consuming tasks should be done in the background or anyway in a separate thread from the UI, which must be always perfectly responsive no matter what the program is doing.

Also, when some time consuming task is taking place, a progress bar or at least a "busy" animation must be shown. But any other task that doesn't depend on it must be allowed to be done, or at the very least, the UI must be responsive (i.e. it can't freeze with a button in the pressed state until the operation is complete!!)

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

> Any time-consuming task like for example:
A. copy or move a large number of messages
B. save a message that has big attachments
C. saving big messages to disk just after downloading

A is a known issue, so a duplicate report we don't need to worry about.

B and C are also likely to be duplicates. Please look for similar bug reports with search https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi

In our bug system, reports are to cover one issue per bu. So as written this is invalid