[Bug 166653] Index files recreated on startup and mail check

[Markus Krötzsch]

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166653


Markus Krötzsch m kroetzsch_public web de changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |m.kroetzsch_public at web.de




--- Comment #5 from Markus Krötzsch <m kroetzsch_public web de>  2009-02-11 09:18:57 ---
I experience the same problem. After startup and also at some later times (the
pattern is not obvious to me), kmail becomes unusable for several minutes
during which continuous hard disk activity is indicated. Investigation showed
that CPU and memory usage is around 10 to 20 percent during that time;
apparently the hard disk access is the major bottleneck. File modification
times of indexing files in the mail directories confirm that their update
spawns over more than 5 minutes each time. The problem occurs since my update
to KMail 1.10.3 (KDE 4.1 Kubuntu) and makes it really hard to continue using
this tool for real work.

My maildir directory is around 1.8G large and contains a total of 53957 files.
Indexing (as expected) takes especially long on large folders. Those are
typically folders for mailing lists which are filtered to be archived there.
This is usually combined with some automatic delete of old messages. Large,
frequently updated folders with automatic delete should be extremely common
when subscribing high-traffic mailing lists.

Suggestions:

* Defer indexing of folders! A simple index maintenance policy could be enough:
** Keep a queue for index recreation jobs, and process this queue folder by
folder when Kmail is inactive for some time.
** Lazily trigger index recreation whenever a folder with dirty index is
opened. Most of the large folders I have are not even opened during a session,
so there is no use updating their indices all the time.

* Avoid complete locks of the UI when recreating indexes. I can live with
KMail's continuously high resource consumption, but I want to still be able to
browse open email folders and to type the message I am editing.

* And, obviously: make (incremental) indexing more efficient -- if you can
manage it (clearly this is not easy).


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