848871 - TB becomes unusably slow (and freezes all the time) if you have folders with big number of messages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 835190

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[matteo sisti sette]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.97 Safari/537.22



Actual results:

It would be tedious to describe every single bug related to this profound design flaw that seems to pervade every part of TB. The fact is that TB is absolutely unusable and even unstable (freezes every once in a while, can eat up much cpu or memory and/or eventually crash even on trivial operations) if you have folders with huge number of messages.
It is NOT just when you do _operations_ on big number of messages. Even operation on SINGLE messages become slower when the total amount of messages you have in your inbox folder (or whatever other folder) is big.

The most annoying example is that saving messages when they are downloaded takes long if they are saved into a folder that have a lot of messages. Additionally the whole UI freezes and becomes unresponsive when this is happening (even separate windows where you're typing a new message).

There are basically two generalised design flaws: 
- most operations take O(N) or more when they should be O(1) (or anyway, take O(moch-more-than-needed).
- most operations that should be done in separate threads are not.

The second issue makes the impact of the first one disastrous, but the first one is a huge issue on its own anyway.

This should have top priority. Any further development in TB is a waste of time until these deep design flaws are fixed, because they make it a unusable program (and the worst thing is you only find out when you have accumulated a huge amount of data).

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

It's great that you are interested in helping us improve thunderbird performance, However, tedious or not, this bug is not actionable as written.  And you attempt to describe generalized solutions assumed causes - i.e. for causes which have not been identified - an approach which is rarely successful, usually frustrating for both reporter and developers.

For this to be actionable, we will need numbers, and we will need steps describing how to reproduce what you are seeing for a specific situation - as you have done in some of your other bugs.  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems#Diagnosis_Steps would be a good starting point

Comment 2

[matteo sisti sette]

Ok then consider this a dupe of 835190