GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 582591
Images very slow to display
Last modified: 2012-06-18 12:02:16 UTC
Please describe the problem: The image rendering itself isn't a problem; it's the fact that Evolution only retrieves one single image at a time. When you consider the overhead of contacting the remote server, waiting for a response, then closing the connection after an image is downloaded only to repeat all of that again for each and every image, it makes for excruciatingly-slow overall image loading. For comparison's sake (since I have just completed migration from Thunderbird to Evolution and have the same e-mails in both clients), I compared the time it took Thunderbird (2.0.0.21) to completely render an e-mail message full of images with how long it took Evolution to render the same e-mail: Thunderbird: 1.5 seconds Evolution: 18 seconds Clearly, this kind of performance gap between a professional-class client and a personal/SOHO client is unacceptable and indicative of a major problem. Evolution is a wonderful e-mail client except for its painful image-loading algorithms. Steps to reproduce: 1. Open a message containing several inline images. 2. Sit and watch images load, one by one. 3. Get cup of coffee while waiting. Actual results: For each image, the DNS is queried, the image host is queried, a connection is established, the image is downloaded, the connection is closed, and the whole process repeats for the next image in the message. One image at a time. Expected results: Evolution's HTML renderer should allow multiple concurrent connections to speed up image acquisition and download. Images in messages opened in Evolution should display as quickly as they do in Thunderbird or Outlook. Does this happen every time? Yes. Other information:
I can confirm that this is happening with Evolution 2.26.1 in Ubuntu Jaunty. It seems to collect one image per second. Also quite often, it seems to stall right at the beginning. When this happens, you cannot get any more mail until you close evolution and restart it.
This also happens in ubuntu karmic koala with Evolution 2.28.1. Not sure how to verify if it's really downloading one image at a time but it takes a long time and what's worse, while it's loading images, the window goes gray and you can't read the email.
I too am having this problem. Each image (gif or jpg) in a html email takes 20+ seconds to download and display. All of the delay is the download part. A typical html email with several images takes minutes to download. In comparison Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 is lightning fast; just a few seconds. Evolution 2.28.1 Operating system - Ubuntu karmic koala 9.10 Server type - both imap and pop (makes no difference) Image type - both gif and jpg HP Pavilion dv8000 notebook with 3 gb memory I have IPV6 disabled by editing /etc/default/grub to include: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="ipv6.disable=1 quiet splash"
I have started to use Thunderbird soley because of this issue. I just tried Evolution again and found it painfully slow (the figures above are quite accurate). I had kind of got used to the slow image download and had turned off image download by default but then I thought, other email clients I use are not this slow so started to investigate. Evolution is a great product so please address this issue to stop from losing further users.
same behaviours here : both for the evolution client taking forever to load embedded images, and me dropping evolution as this bugs ruins all the other efforts.
I also have moved to Thunderbird because of this issue. I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 64bit and was finding that images were loading over an order of magnitude faster in Thunderbird than Evolution. Given the prevalence of html emails with images, this slow performance makes Evolution virtually unusable, which is a great pity since it is very good in other areas.
I too am seeing evolution taking forever to display html email that involve loading images from the internet. Same when connecting to email server via either IMAP or POP. If using gmail's browser interface via Firefox the same emails display very fast. Standard Ubuntu 9.10 32Bit & Evolution 2.28.1.
Hi, I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 and Evolution 2.28.1, I have been noticing for a while that images have been slow to load. I had been convinced that it was just me being impatient, but it's now taking ages to load images. Is anyone aware of a workaround to this problem, as I'm on the verge of migrating away from evolution, purely because of this problem. It doesn't look as though any action is being taken on this problem, which is a shame as the product is good, but has this major flaw. Can someone provide this group with details of what's required to get this escalated please..
Given that this problem is a show stopper (users dumping Evolution as a consequence), why is its importance rated at only 'Normal minor'?? Your definition of Normal is "Either a fairly straightforward workaround exists or the functionality is not very important and/or not frequently used." So what is the "fairly straightforward workaround"... move to Thunderbird perhaps? Why would this functionality be rated as "not very important and/or not frequently used", its used by everyone, frequently. I would have thought this problem should be rated as Urgent.
Same problem here. It's a major pain.
Exactly same issue here in Debian Squeeze. I like Evolution because it's integration to GNOME (like showing calendar events in your panel) and don't really want to have two mail managers on the same machine. It would be great to get this fixed ASAP.
I see this too on actual master (~2.30.0), but the download is pretty same quick as with a wget. A little parallelism might help here, as long as server supports multiple requests in once. Nonetheless, I'm confirming the bug for 2.30.x.
Even if the server does not support multiple TCP connections. I think HTTP pipelining could improve performance. This basically means multiple images can be requested by queuing requests over a single TCP connection, thus saving DNS lookups and constructing each TCP connection. You can combine HTTP pipelining with multiple TCP connections for optimum performance. However, saying that, I think Firefox does not use pipelining as default, I am not sure why.
*** Bug 624423 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
i was suspecting a dns problem and apparently i fixed my 2 years old problem by switching my box to static IP + manually added my ISP's primary and secondary dns server. Guess what : every html mail load in a blink of en eye ! Note that my windows boxes are all served by my router's DHCP and are not affected by this weird dns, go figure....
Imgages load extreamly slow in Evolution 2.30.3 yet thunderbird was so fast at the same thing. I don't have dns problems. ubuntu 10.10 16 meg cable connection. This is a big show stopper for the email client Evolution as I will have to go back to thunderbird till it's fixed.
Just to add that I've also got this problem with 2.30.3 and Ubuntu Maverick. Images are so slow to load, and it often simply crashes whilst trying to get the images. As already said above in other posts, Thunderbird loads images in seconds. Evolution is unusable because of this.
The same problem with 2.32.2 in Gentoo Linux (64 bit), and all of the versions before. Pictures load extremely slow. Thunderbird loads images quite quickly, I also don't have any problems loading images in other programs.
I experience the same problem with Evolution 3.0.3 from Ubuntu Natty gnome3 ppa.
Put this first line in your /etc/resolv.conf: options single-request This helped against slow DNS resolution on all my machines and images get loaded quite quickly in Evolution. It also speeds up other programs like Firefox etc. I protect my resolv.conf files with "chmod ugo-w /etc/resolv.conf" and "chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf" against network managers trying to change it.
Adding this line to my /etc/resolv.conf didn't seem to help. Evolution is the only program that seems to be slow.
This issue should now be fixed in Evolution 3.5 which is using WebKit for mail rendering. It fetches all remote images in parallel using libsoup, like for example Epiphany does. I doubt we can make it any faster :-) We only intervene to check whether the image is already stored in cache and if user has allowed us to fetch images from the net.