[Kde-pim] Akonadi mail performance outlook

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Freitag, 16. Mai 2014, 17:19:44 schrieb GEO:
> On Friday 02 May 2014 11:28:22 Daniel Vrátil wrote:
> > > 3.) During the folder sync, it is nearly impossible to click a message
> > > in
> > > the folder. You will have to wait extremely long. This should not be the
> > > case. Fetching a message content should be completely independent from
> > > syncing the folder and should only be limited by physical things like
> > > connection speed, disk i/o, cpu load, ram etc.
> > 
> > It cannot be independent, because in the background it shares the same
> > database, where database locking and long transactions (known problem,
> > again)   lead to retrieval operations taking long time.
> 
> This does not sound like someone is going to solve it. Can we expect this
> problem to be addressed in the future? (by fetching message contents
> independent from the database?)

I think it needs to be solved.

And I don´t think this limitation is needed cause of database locking, 
clicking on the message just reads it for display. I don´t think that 
synchronizing the folder needs to lock out read access. At some time message 
read flag may need to be updated, but I don´t see why this can´t be happening 
asynchronously.

I even have this on sending mails. If I send a mail during folder 
synchronization it can happen that the window is greyed out but stays there, 
until the folder synchronization is done. Which can take minutes with Exchange 
IMAP (supposedly would be faster with Dovecot, as Exchange´s IMAP 
implementation… well…).

In my eyes, there is something still seriously flawed here. A synchronization 
operation is a *background* operation. It should never block the GUI. I never 
seen this with Zimbra, which also used MySQL as a backend, but well, they do 
not have do to IMAP synchronization, unless one adds an IMAP account to 
monitor to it.

Akonadi just does not yet provide the needed parallelism in the backend. I 
think, its just guess work, but Kevin also hinted at that, there may be issues 
with its job scheduler to solve.

Akonadi needs to be able to serve requests from KMail while synchronizing 
folders in the background… I see no other way to deliver up to the promise 
that it separates background work from KMail GUI and thus KMail would stay 
responsive at all times. Its stated in its design notes on the wiki and due to 
that I think any blocking of KMail is a bug.

For Maildir its acceptable now after the no sorting patch. Still even there 
are these KMail blocks on synchronizing folders in the background are still 
possible.

-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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