886073 - Folder message counts lost if large number of folders (~600 folders), various side effects

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[Robert Miles]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130511120803

Steps to reproduce:

Various steps that created a large number of folders, mostly under Local Folders, and put at least a few news messages each in most of them.  Too many folders to count - probably a few thousand of them.

Tb 22.0 beta; also seen with several earlier beta versions, including TB 18 beta.


Actual results:

Several folders at a time often lose their message counts whenever the number of folders approaches a certain number. Sometimes dozens of folders at a time.  With the folder count about a dozen higher, some of the folders also lose all the messages they contain.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mozilla.support.thunderbird/KFMrAxF_LTs

Importing or deleting messages seems to make no difference for this problem - hundreds of thousands imported, tens of thousands deleted, with no effect on this problem.  Adding or deleting folders definitely has an effect, though.

The counts are recoverable in folders under Local folders, but under newsgroups servers, this often makes Tb try to download all headers still on the server again.  These new headers are sometimes marked as read if the previous copy
was marked read; but sometime not.  I haven't seen clear signs
on whether this problem also happens for folders under email servers.

No similar problem seen with email.  That may be because I have a far smaller number of folders containing any email.

No error messages that seem related to this problem.



Expected results:

Message counts retained, no folders unexpectedly emptied.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Are you saying it does not happen in version 17?

Comment 2

[Robert Miles]

It probably happened in version 17 beta.  I didn't try it in the version 17 released version.

Comment 3

[:aceman]

Can you tell where is the display of the number of messages that is misbehaving?
So this only happens under the special Local folders account and news account?

Comment 4

[Robert Miles]

I see the total number of messages per folder in the left pane that lists the folders, to the right of the folder name.  I'm not sure if it's Thunderbird that displays it there, or one of the add-ons I'm using. I do known that it's one of the add-ons that displays the number of unread messages between the folder name and the total number of messages.

It might happen in the mail folders as well.  I just don't have enough messages in the mail folders to see it happening there.

Comment 5

[Robert Miles]

I just got the message that Thunderbird 23.0 beta was available, and installed it on one of my computers.  During this installation, one news folder was emptied of all the headers already downloaded - around 450000 of them.

I'm now downloading the headers again (newsgroup alt.support.diabetes from server news.teranews.com). but this will exhaust my download limit from that server for today.

Comment 6

[Robert Miles]

I checked my backups, and found that the local folder that appeared to be emptied was actually empty of messages in advance.  I finally checked the number of folders needed to make the message counts for part of the folders disappear - around 600.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Robert, thanks for the update. So this happens with current beta version?

Comment 8

[Robert Miles]

It happens with at least some of the last week's aurora versions of Earlybird.  I no longer keep enough folders under Thunderbird beta or Thunderbird release to tell if it still occurs there or not.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

let's leave it open long enough for you to test the 38 release and report results

Comment 10

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard

Comment 11

[Robert Miles]

Tested with aurora 40.0a2 (2015-06-02), about 900 folders.

Problem appears fixed in this version.

Not very practical at present to test in a beta or release version.