Fixing things Akonadi doesn't with some SQL-fu

[Martin Steigerwald]

René J.V. Bertin - 20.03.18, 21:47:
> On Tuesday March 20 2018 13:26:27 Paul Vixie wrote:
[…]
> The only thing I new feature I think 5.x has that I miss (a bit) is support
> for GMail's non-legacy authentication protocol which supposed won't lock me
> out each time I connect from a new location. But my phone also needs the
> legacy login protocol so either way I'm stuck there.

I found quite some notable performance improvements between KDEPIM 4.x and 
KDEPIM 17.08. The last one is that KMail caches the threading in folders, so 
switches even between large folders of more than 30000 mails are almost 
instant once the initial threading has completed. This clearly increases my 
productivity.

Also KAddressbook as a much nicer GUI and the crypto settings and handling in 
KMail improved. There are likely quite some other notable changes, that I 
currently miss, but remember the major work between KDEPIM 4.x and curent KF5 
based KDEPIM was porting the whole thing to KF5 and Qt 5 which has been a 
major task in itself. There are still applications that do net yet have a KF5 
/ Qt 5 based release. This was maintenance work the KDEPIM developers had to 
do. Work that didn´t automagically create new features or fix up all the 
existing bugs. And work that had quite some potential for introducing 
regressions.

> FWIW, something else I do which may limit issues for me: I quit Kontact
> before suspending the computer because I'm pretty certain Akonadi doesn't
> really like connections dropping out from under it when in the middle of
> something.

Oh, in my impression this got a lot better.

I never quit KMail before hibernating or suspend. The work-related KMail with 
the Exchange IMAP based account usually recovers just fine. Sometimes it needs 
some time, but most of the time it gets it right. Even after a night of having 
been hibernated. Not all KDEPIM 5.x versions have been this reliable for me, 
there have been some improvements in recent versions.

Please note, that I can´t say much about KDEPIM 17.12 yet. I am still at 
KDEPIM 17.08, but Sandro works on KDEPIM 17.12 packaging for Debian and I bet 
it won´t take that him much longer to get it through the build daemons for all 
currently supported architectures.

But even after cleaning out more than 1 million mails from archived folders 
into xz compressed tarballs, the POP3 + Maildir setup still manages more than 
one million of mails. Even folders with more than 50000+ mails are quite 
usable meanwhile. The only thing that is still slow is threading within KMail. 
If I disable threading after clicking on a folder with about that amount of 
mails KMail + Akonadi just takes a few seconds here in order to display its 
contents.

Is it perfect yet? No way, but for it got a long way. And IMHO it is much more 
stable than the KDEPIM 4.x stuff and a lot faster too. Also in KDEPIM 3 times 
I was never able to use folders with more than 30000 to 40000 mails. Non 
Akonadi based KMail became just to slow. Of course, the laptop I had back then 
still had a harddisk, a lot less memory and an older CPU, while this one has a 
SSD, 16 GiB of RAM and at least a Sandybridge CPU. This definitely helps and I 
throw 1 GiB towards the InnoDB buffer pool for MariaDB, but still… for me 
KDEPIM works reasonable well. Not perfect, I do have some issues from time to 
time, but I did not rebuild the whole Akonadi database in a long, long time – 
simply cause it did not break for me. I remember I ranted about rebuilding the 
Akonadi setup several times myself. I know how that felt to me, it was not a 
pleasant experience, but it just did not break anymore for me, since a long 
time. I think since I use KDEPIM 16.04 at least.

So while I totally get that you and others have major issues, I and I think 
quite a lot of other users don´t have those. That said, my POP 3 based KMail 
has a clean maildir only setup, no mixedmaildir anymore.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin