[Bug 289342] Akonadi server should shut down automatically if idle

[Jonathan Marten]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289342





--- Comment #2 from Jonathan Marten <jjm keelhaul me uk>  2011-12-19 14:05:53 ---
I don't think the comparison is quite fair.  Certainly the latter two of those
that you mention provide essential system services that need to operate
regardless of what the user is doing - or even when no user is logged in.  It
could be argued that CUPS could stop when idle - but it needs to run as root in
order to perform some of its functions and therefore there may be problems in
starting/stopping it on user demand.

Akonadi, on the other hand, requires no privileges and provides access to the
user's data (whether local or remote) at the user's request when using PIM
applications (the Plasma calendar counts as one of those).  If the user is not
using the application, there is no need for Akonadi to remain active, and there
could even be data integrity problems if it continues to access the data or
remote resources even when the user is not expecting it to.  In my example of
continuing to access POP3 mail after KMail has exited, this could lead to
emails being fetched and stored where the user is not expecting them to go -
which is only a step away from data loss.

On the question of the system resources used by Akonadi this is surely not the
first time that this has been raised, but just for illustration:

akonadi_control                1.0M
mysqld                    46.1M
akonadiserver                3.4M
akonadi_agent_launcher            2.6M
akonadi_kdeaccounts_resource        9.3M
akonadi_agent_launcher            4.6M
akonadi_maildispatcher_agent        4.4M
akonadi_mailfilter_agent        5.7M
akonadi_pop3_resource            8.2M
akonadi_vcarddir_resource        3.0M

cupsd                    912K

(Reported by KDE System Activity in the "Mem" column.  No PIM applications
running, KMail configured for Local Folders + 1 POP3 fetch, KAddressBook with 2
resources, Nepomuk Email Indexer turned off.  So Akonadi is using nearly 100
times the memory of CUPS.)

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