#510 new
Josh Dick

Poor Touchpad Scrolling Performance in Message View

Reported by Josh Dick | November 27th, 2013 @ 10:33 PM

When using the touchpad on my MacBookPro8,2 (15-inch, Early 2011) under Mavericks, scrolling slowly inside MailMate's Message View by keeping two fingers on the touchpad and gradually moving them up and down is very stuttery/janky.

Inertial scrolling (quickly swiping with two fingers and then releasing) seems to be smoother.

I believe this is an issue isolated to MailMate rather than my hardware, since other applications (Firefox/Chrome/etc.) don't exhibit the same scrolling issue.

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny November 28th, 2013 @ 10:03 AM

    MailMate has no custom code handling the view. It's a standard GUI component. What about other Cocoa applications such as Apple Mail and Safari?

    Maybe MailMate is busy synchronizing account(s) and this affects the general responsiveness of MailMate?

  • Josh Dick

    Josh Dick November 28th, 2013 @ 04:29 PM

    I'm no Mac developer, but I was able to get a test application going in XCode with a simple WebView. I took the exact same content that was having scrolling issues in MailMate (http://html5weekly.com/archive/115.html) and loaded it into the WebView, and the scrolling issues didn't occur.

    The issue consistently happens all the time, even when MailMate isn't synchronizing, both in MailMate's main view as well as the single "open message" view.

    Maybe the problem has something to do with the "header overlay" that always appears above the message contents? If the overlay is drawn directly "on top of" the message contents rather than above them (resizing the message contents when the overlay is expanded), could there be some calculations involved in drawing the overlay that impact scrolling performance?

    I tried to grab a screen recording of the issue but doing a screen recording pretty much wrecks scrolling performance across the board. :) I can try recording the issue externally with a camera, if that helps.

  • benny

    benny November 28th, 2013 @ 04:43 PM

    Does your first comment mean that you only see this for certain messages? If yes, then I would appreciate an example message (“Message ▸ Forward as Attachment”): http://freron.com/contact

    No need for a camera. I believe that it stutters for you.

    What about the single message window (⌘O)?

    Are you sure nothing syncs? You can check using the Activity Viewer (⌥⌘0).

    (I'm actually not on Mavericks right now, but I don't currently have any similar reports and most users are on Mavericks.)

  • Josh Dick

    Josh Dick November 28th, 2013 @ 05:09 PM

    I actually see this for all messages, I just picked a message that happened to have a lot of HTML and images in it to stress-test the "good" case in other programs.

    As I mentioned above:

    • The message I tested with contains the exact contents of this page: http://html5weekly.com/archive/115.html but I've forwarded the original e-mail as you requested.
    • The single message window is indeed also affected.

    I tried looking at Activity Viewer as you mentioned, and the scrolling issue still happens even while the only black line in Activity Viewer is "S57 IDLE".

    Note that the issue isn't a huge one--of course scrolling still works--it's just noticeably choppier than I see in browsers/other WebViews, at least enough for me to notice it and write about it here. :)

  • benny

    benny November 29th, 2013 @ 03:16 PM

    Ok, the message is not important and MailMate connection activity is not a factor. Thanks for making that clear.

    It may be that other users see this as well, but they have not reported it.

    Some “random” questions:

    Do you have any secondary machine(s) where you can reproduce this issue?

    How many messages do you have in MailMate (roughly)?

    How does MailMate perform if you look in the Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities)? What about when you are scrolling?

    Thanks in advance.

  • Josh Dick

    Josh Dick November 29th, 2013 @ 05:13 PM

    How many messages do you have in MailMate (roughly)?

    I have roughly 12,000 messages in MailMate, but most of the time there are usually no more than 10 messages visible (inbox, smart folders, etc.)

    How does MailMate perform if you look in the Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities)? What about when you are scrolling?

    According to Activity Monitor, MailMate sits at 0% CPU when idle, but consistently goes up to 13% CPU while scrolling.

    Do you have any secondary machine(s) where you can reproduce this issue?

    On a MacBookPro10,1 (15" Retina, Mid 2012) also running Mavericks, MailMate's CPU usage goes up to 10% while scrolling, but scroll performance is much better overall. The repaint interval appears to be much faster than on the older 2011 MBP, so the jank is much less pronounced.

    On the Retina MacBook Pro, when using the aforementioned test page/e-mail, MailMate's scrolling performs better than Firefox but very slightly worse than Safari or Chrome. On the non-Retina MacBook Pro, MailMate's scrolling performance is far behind all of the browsers and my simple WebView test.

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