835190 - UI and typing in compose blocked very often on get new mail activity filtered to large folder

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[matteo sisti sette]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.56 Safari/537.17

Steps to reproduce:

I have a folder with hundreds of thousands of messages in it. I receive a few dozens of messages every hour that get put into that folder by filters

Hit the "Write" button and type an email, while every once in a while, new messages get downloaded.


Actual results:

When new messages are being downloaded, the whole UI gets blocked every once in a while. Even response to keyboard gets frozen when the UI is blocked.

Seems to be every time a new downloaded message is SAVED, it blocks the whole UI, every single window of the UI, as if writing to disk were done in the same thread as the UI



Expected results:

The UI should be always 100% responsive, no matter what is being done in the background.

Actually this is just one of a million examples.

There seem to be two wrong design patterns that are practically omnipresent in Thunderbird:
- a lot of operations that should be O(1) are O(N) (or at least increasing with N) where N is the number of messages involved, or often worst, the number of messages existing in the folders involved
- no threading or no decent threading: every single writing operation blocks the entire program

Basically TB becomes completely unusable when you have a lot of messages to deal with.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Part of what you have described here and in your other bugs are caused by inefficiency in specific functions of Thunderbird. 

But at some point, even if those other bugs were not present, you are hit with what is described in Bug 842371.

Does anyone know if this bug is a duplicate?

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

matteo, 
- can this be reproduced when the large folder is recently opened in a tab, i.e. just before new mail arrives?
- when this happens, what percent of CPU is being used by thunderbird process?

Comment 4

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard