GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 313664
Select contacts from Global Address List very slow
Last modified: 2013-07-23 14:33:25 UTC
Please describe the problem: This is an MS Exchange specific bug. When using the dialog window titled "Select contacts from Address Book" to search the MS Exchange Global Address List (GAL), subsequent queries are extremely slow. There are two problems here. The first problem is that subsequent queries in the Contact tab of evolution against the MS Exchange GAL are very responsive after the first query. It appears that some sort of caching is being used to optimize subsequent queries. However, the dialog window for selecting contacts does not appear to make use of this same caching mechanism. The second problem is that while the query is being executed, there is no indication of activity, leading the user to believe the application is not doing anything at all. Perhaps a status bar on this dialog window would be appropriate, or at least a spinner on the mouse icon. Steps to reproduce: 1. Compose a new message 2. Click on the "To..." button 3. Select Global Address List for the dropdown 4. Enter a search query Actual results: A very long wait occurs each time a search is performed Expected results: Anything but the first search should be almost immediate, similar to a search done from the Contacts tab of evolution against the Global Address List. Additionally, it would be nice to have a spinner while the search is being performed. Does this happen every time? Yes, making it almost impossible to quickly build a list of recipients. Other information: The version of evolution is 2.2.1.1 from the primary Ubuntu apt repository. The exchange server is 2003 and is being queried over a local http connection. This bug report is coming upstream from ubuntu: http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13343
exchange backend specific.
The status bar needs to update the status of the search being performed.
The status bar indicating search operation going on general 'Evolution' bug, so changed the component. Confirmed the bug as it is required.
The second problem (status bar indicating that search is going on )has been resolved . So shifting it back to exchange connector for the first problem which is exchange specific.
Dan Allen, Which version of Exchange connector you are using now? Can you mark GAL folder for offline usage and see if the performance is better?
I am seeing this problema too... I was using Fedora Core 3 with Evolution 2.0 and the problem was even there but it didn't affected me because in the contact search dialog (when composing mail) there was a "Find" button. The behavior back then was that it looked for the contact when you hit enter. Doing that, Connector sometimes would stall "searching..." and when I hit enter again it would bring the results instantly. So I had a workaround. Now that I upgraded to Fedora Core 5 I am starting to feel this problem very badly. The contact search dialog will search as soon as you start typing and hiting enter won't do the trick. The client and the server are on a corporate LAN so connection is usually very good. Trying to track this problem down I discovered that the bandwidth used during the search was very very low when looking at gkrellm (26 KB/seg) which is almost nothing when you are talking about a LAN connection. It seems to bring some information during abount 10 - 12 seconds and only then is when Evo shows the results. I made some tests that the reporter mentioned in the original comment and yes, the Contact module finds the contacts instantly (basically because enter needs to be pressed to execute the query) and even with large results, the response is very reasonable. I would suggest to make mandatory the pressing of enter when your are looking contacts in the contact dialog when composing a mail (which was the old behavior). But that wouldn't solve the root cause since the "find as you type" feature in the compose window would still be slow. When I look at OutLook users searching for contacts directly in the compose window I see the results are shown instantly as they type. I'd like that for Evolution. This are my packaging numbers: evolution-sharp-0.10.2-9 evolution-data-server-devel-1.5.92-1 evolution-webcal-2.4.1-3.2 evolution-connector-2.5.92-1 evolution-data-server-1.5.92-1 evolution-2.6.0-1 I am updating my system right now with yum which will upgrade Evo to 2.6.1 but I guess this problem is not solved yet. I think the priority and severity of this bug should be raised. -William
How is the performance if you select GAL for offline sync ?
I am so glad that someone was finally able to reproduce the behavior I was seeing because unfortunately I simply don't have access to exchange server any longer (switched jobs). I did beg a couple of my former coworkers to give it a try again, but I can only hope. The strangest part about what I observed was that sometimes the results would be instant while other times it seemed to have permanently staled. I would alternate between using "find as you type" and opening the contacts dialog and searching from there. It appears that if I did it too many times in succession, it would get into a hung state and refuse to search successfully for a period of time. This suggests to me that the requests to the GAL are queueing up.
(In reply to comment #7) > How is the performance if you select GAL for offline sync ? > Sorry for the late response. I have been testing this option for a while and it seems to improve the situation when you find as you type directly in the composer window. There is a quirk though: It usually (not always) finds the contact very quickly but it still is exchanging information (very slowly) with the server trying to further filter the context list. Let's say you type a few characters, it finds a first candidate and shows a list of posible contacts, then you type a few more characters, it finds the next contact very quickly but the list doesn't trim down until about 10 seconds after it finishes to talk with the server. I monitored this with iptraf and gkrellm. I don't know if limiting the number of GALs responses will improve the situation I described above (right now it's 500) but I wonder why the communication is so slow (30 Kb/seg according to gkrellm). Like I said before I am on a corporate LAN. Now, when you use the contact search dialog, the situation doesn't seem to improve very much there. It usually talks with the server more often than not and the fact that it doesn't offer feedback is a bit annoying. It end up finding the results but after 10 seconds. The problem with this is that it takes longer to know for sure if it is still transmitting information or if the contact doesn't exist, the only feedback I can get right now is when I see the network graph in gkrellm. I've installed FC3 and FC5 on some computers here and the problem is exactly the same with both versions. And I have used several live cds too with different versions of Evolution and still the same. Are you sure you can't reporduce this problem on your setup? If you monitor the transfer speed when searching contacts, how fast does it go? I hope there is something that can be done here. Thanks.
William Lovaton, thanks for the information. Here our test team had tested Autocompletion with GAL with our test servers having some 2 lakh contacts and we have not found any issues. I'll dig more into the code and see if we can try to improve it, and I'll get back to you if I need to test my patch.
2 lakh?? interesting... we are not that many here but the number is still big. How much time does it take to filter the contact list when you're typing a contact's name on the compose window? Can you check the network transfer speed? I already asked the server admin to give some details about the configuration of our Exchange server to see if there is anything odd. I'll keep you up to date soon. Thanks for your help.
The server is an Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 and I am told that the GAL configuration is the one that comes by default. Our admin have tested the GAL with wireless devices and it seems to work fine.
(In reply to comment #10) > William Lovaton, thanks for the information. > > Here our test team had tested Autocompletion with GAL with our > test servers having some 2 lakh contacts and we have not found any issues. > I'll dig more into the code and see if we can try to improve it, > and I'll get back to you if I need to test my patch. > Sushma, are you limiting the number of GAL responses? I find a number of 10 to be good enough for speed. Before, it was in 500 and very long resultsets would take longer to load. Now I am testing Ubuntu Dapper Flight 7 (Evo 2.6.1) and every thing seems a bit better. How ever, the search contact dialog could recieve some improvements, like putting back the "Search" button so it works like the Contact module, the searches are very fast there. It would search with a more precise query since now it is starting the lookup when you write 3 characthers. -William
You can set the Limit to the GAL responses in Edit -> Preferences -> Mail Accounts -> Edit -> Receiving Options. By default it'll be set to 500. And what exactly is "putting back the "Search" button" mean? Are you referring to "advanced search" option? (See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260404)
(In reply to comment #14) > You can set the Limit to the GAL responses in > Edit -> Preferences -> Mail Accounts -> Edit -> Receiving Options. > By default it'll be set to 500. Yeah... I did set the value to 10 and it seems to work faster now. > > And what exactly is "putting back the "Search" button" mean? > Are you referring to "advanced search" option? > (See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260404) I mean the search button in the dialog when you click the "To..." button when composing a mail. In Evo 2.0 from Fedora Core 3 it would start the search only when you hit enter or click the Search button so you can put a more precise search term. Now it would start the search when you type 3 or more characters hence the bigger chance to get a huge resultset and taking a long time to finish. This has nothing to do with the advanced search, it's just a matter of the user deciding when to start the contact look up. I hope I made my self clear enogh this time. ;)
Name selector dialog was re-written by removing the search button and enabling autocompletion there in 2.2. Not sure if it was done based on some bug or feature request. Please file a bug on address book regarding that, as it is not specific to exchange provider.
The "evolution-exchange" package only supports Exchange 2000 and 2003 servers. Newer versions such as Exchange 2007 and 2010 are not supported by "evolution-exchange". It is required to use the package "evolution-ews" (or to some extend "evolution-mapi") for newer version fo Exchange servers. If the problem/request described in this report still happens with a recent version of "evolution-ews" or "evolution-mapi", please add a comment to this report (and update the "product" setting accordingly if possible). There are currently no plans to continue the development of the package "evolution-exchange", so this report will soon be closed as WONTFIX. Thanks for your understanding and sorry that the reported problem was not solved in time in the package "evolution-exchange".
evolution-exchange only supports the older Microsoft Exchange server versions 2000 and 2003. The last stable release of evolution-exchange was 3.4.4 which took place a year ago. evolution-exchange is now deprecated and not under active development anymore. It is unlikely that there will be any further active development. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping. Please feel free to reopen this bug report in the future if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again. Also feel free to reopen this ticket and change the "Product" field accordingly if the reported issue still happens with a recent version (newer than version 3.6) of one of those Exchange backends that are still supported. Please see https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/3.8/exchange-connectors-overview.html for more information on available backends.