Bug 2068855

Summary: Regression: Evolution 3.42.4's mail composer lags like hell with WebKit2Gtk3 2.36, and also messes with background colors (impossible to read with Adwaita-Dark)
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Jean-François Fortin Tam <nekohayo>
Component: webkit2gtk3Assignee: Michael Catanzaro <mcatanza>
Status: CLOSED UPSTREAM QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 35CC: erack, gnome-sig, koen.schram, mcatanza, tpopela
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Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2022-03-28 17:43:32 UTC Type: Bug
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Description Jean-François Fortin Tam 2022-03-27 01:03:01 UTC
Unaffected:

webkit2gtk3-2.34.0-1.fc35.x86_64
webkit2gtk3-jsc-2.34.0-1.fc35.x86_64

Affected:

webkit2gtk3-2.36.0-2.fc35.x86_64
webkit2gtk3-jsc-2.36.0-2.fc35.x86_64


Symptoms: on a fresh boot, on a ThinkPad X220 (Intel Sandybridge graphics) on GNOME's Xorg/X11 session, with the affected versions of webkit2gtk3 mentioned above, Evolution 3.42.x lags like hell when you type in the HTML email composer, you can type some stuff and wait for a solid 20 seconds for characters to appear for example. It also has broken HTML email rendering (in the preview pane) when using the Adwaita-Dark GTK3 theme (which sounds like what was observed upstream in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/1835).

Downgrading to webkit2gtk3 2.34 and versionlocking them solves the issue. Upgrading them back to 2.36 again causes the issue to immediately reappear, so it is 100% reproducible for me.

Comment 1 Michael Catanzaro 2022-03-27 01:56:25 UTC
(In reply to Jean-François Fortin Tam from comment #0)
> Symptoms: on a fresh boot, on a ThinkPad X220 (Intel Sandybridge graphics)
> on GNOME's Xorg/X11 session, with the affected versions of webkit2gtk3
> mentioned above, Evolution 3.42.x lags like hell when you type in the HTML
> email composer, you can type some stuff and wait for a solid 20 seconds for
> characters to appear for example.

Ah, sounds like a problem with hardware acceleration. Does WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 fix this for you?

If so, we need to report this upstream and hope it gets fixed, because hardware acceleration will be mandatory with GTK 4, so you'll be really out of luck if we don't resolve it now....

> It also has broken HTML email rendering
> (in the preview pane) when using the Adwaita-Dark GTK3 theme (which sounds
> like what was observed upstream in
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/1835).
> 
> Downgrading to webkit2gtk3 2.34 and versionlocking them solves the issue.
> Upgrading them back to 2.36 again causes the issue to immediately reappear,
> so it is 100% reproducible for me.

Well it looks like Milan already decided this was an Evolution bug, and already committed a fix for it, per the issue that you just linked to, so I guess I don't need to worry about this. This seems very unrelated to your performance issue though. :)

Comment 2 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2022-03-27 04:42:02 UTC
Urgh, of course now when I want to reproduce the performance issue, unlike previously, it doesn't occur even without the environment variable to disable webkit compositing... it types smoothly. Yet the only thing that changed (as far as I know) is that I am now using the built-in laptop screen instead of an external monitor plugged through the docking station. So technically, the resolution and DPI are not the same, but I don't see what else could be different (or even why this would cause the issue to have been consistently triggerable some hours ago and not anymore). Could there be something I should check on this front?

Comment 3 Michael Catanzaro 2022-03-27 16:39:27 UTC
I don't know, sorry. But higher resolution could certainly slow things down more.

Comment 4 Michael Catanzaro 2022-03-28 17:43:32 UTC
I'm going to go ahead and close this. The Evolution issue is https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/1835, as you noted. As for performance troubles, that will have to be reported on WebKit Bugzilla because it's surely not going to be resolved here.

Comment 5 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2022-03-30 22:35:03 UTC
OK I narrowed down the issue: this happens when the laptop is in a dual-screen set up, i.e. where you open the lid from the laptop sitting in the docking station and the built-in screen turns on. As soon as you close the lid, performance characteristics become normal again. When running with `WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 evolution`, the issue does not occur even in WebKit2GTK3 2.36.0.

I therefore filed https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=238578