954573 - Ctrl+F search in a conversation window with a long backlog hangs Instantbird

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Instantbird Graveyard :: Conversation, defect)

Description

[Instantbot]

*** Original post on bio 1140 by Kevin Gadd <kevin.gadd AT gmail.com> at 2011-11-03 03:47:00 UTC ***

If you hit Ctrl+F to search inside a conversation that has a long backlog (say, 1-2 days worth of IRC conversation in a busy channel), as soon as you type a character, the Instantbird process hangs forever.

I tested with a short backlog and the hang does not occur.

Comment 1

[Benedikt Pfeifer]

*** Original post on bio 1140 at 2012-05-06 22:41:53 UTC ***

What does "a long backlog" mean? I've tried with a current nightly build and searching >4500 messages worked fine for me.

Comment 2

[Instantbot]

*** Original post on bio 1140 by Kevin Gadd <kevin.gadd AT gmail.com> at 2012-05-06 22:44:23 UTC ***

I thought I made it clear initially, but to be more precise, the .txt log files for an individual channel backlog that I have range from 200kb to 1.5mb for a single session.
One of the 1.5mb ones is ~27k lines.

Comment 3

[Instantbot]

*** Original post on bio 1140 by Mark Hammond (:markh) <mhammond AT mozilla.com> at 2012-10-12 00:35:49 UTC ***

I'm seeing this problem.  With #developers on mozilla.org, pressing Ctrl+F can take about *five* minutes before it begins responding.  In this time, the connection to the server was lost.  I'm on a reasonably new i7 box with 16GB Ram, Windows7x64.

The logs for this channel are:

11,519,727 2012-08-26.173058+1000.json
 1,765,942 2012-09-26.164716+1000.json
 4,516,416 2012-10-01.115332+1000.json

The most recent has ~34000 lines.

This is basically making the Find function unusable for me.

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 1140 at 2012-10-12 08:06:52 UTC ***

Was the message you were trying to find a recent one? Would things work for you if we kept only the last 1000 or 2000 messages displayed, and removed the older messages automatically?

Comment 5

[Instantbot]

*** Original post on bio 1140 by Kevin Gadd <kevin.gadd AT gmail.com> at 2012-10-12 10:15:11 UTC ***

Controlling the length of the backlog seems like a reasonable approach. For full backlog search, you can right-click the channel and pick Show Logs or search the log files yourself in another window. I don't know what the right target size would be, but a few thousand lines seems like a decent place to start.

One issue to consider, though, would be whether special steps are necessary if a message that contained your name is about to fall off the backlog. Since that message made the tab blue, if you come back 12 hours later and find a blue tab with no messages for you in it, that might be confusing. But again in that case, maybe it's fine to just search the logs.

Comment 6

[Instantbot]

*** Original post on bio 1140 by Kevin Gadd <kevin.gadd AT gmail.com> at 2013-01-22 08:53:00 UTC ***

Just did a Ctrl+F search that took about two minutes. By the time it finished blocking the main thread I had been disconnected from all my servers. Would it be possible to at least move it off the main thread so it doesn't cause connectivity loss?

Comment 7

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 1140 at 2013-01-22 09:17:43 UTC ***

(In reply to comment #6)
> Just did a Ctrl+F search that took about two minutes. By the time it finished
> blocking the main thread I had been disconnected from all my servers.

:-(
I would be curious to throw the gecko profiler at this to see how the time is spent, but I doubt we can do much on the Instantbird side to speed things up (except reducing the total size of the backlog, as I said in comment 4).

> Would it
> be possible to at least move it off the main thread so it doesn't cause
> connectivity loss?

That would be a platform bug to file in bugzilla.mozilla.org

Comment 8

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

*** Original post on bio 1140 at 2013-03-26 12:11:12 UTC ***

Confirming.