[kdepim-users] YAFKM Day 2

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi Jerome!

Am Mittwoch, 26. Juni 2013, 14:51:23 schrieb Jerome Yuzyk:
> So a fresh day arises and I try my migration again. I (hopefully) clear out
> all traces of what I've done already with this script:
> 
>   akonadictl stop
> 
>   ps ux | grep akonadi
> 
>   read ans
> 
>   rm -rf ~/.local/share/akonadi/*
> 
>   rm -rf ~/.config/akonadi
>   rm ~/.kde/share/config/akonadi*
> 
>   rm ~/.kde/share/config/kmail2rc
>   rm ~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc
>   rm ~/.kde/share/config/emailidentities
>   rm ~/.kde/share/config/emaildefaults
>   rm ~/.kde/share/config/mailtransports
> 
> Is this thorough enough?
> 
> Then I restart akonadi.
> 
> 378 ad-template  akonadictl start
> 
> and I get this dumped to the Konsole:
> 
> Connecting to deprecated signal
> QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString)
> QSqlDatabasePrivate::removeDatabase: connection 'initConnection' is still
> in use, all queries will cease to work.
[…]
> WTF #1. I've had this nearly every time I restart akonadi so I press on.
> 
> I go into akonadi configuration and re-point Local Folders to my ~/Mail.
> Nothing happens - no indexing, no CPU activity, nothing. WTF #2.

[… and more strange messages on console / in ~/.xsession-errors …]

You have my sympathies. I perfectly understand how you feel.

I reported quite some of those messages to bugs.kde.org as I think that

1) either the message points to a real problem which needs to be fixed,

2) or it is harmless and then I expect not to see it unless I turn on 
debugging


Since I managed to find the root cause of the mail data loss I experienced 
after my migration to be the CRM114 spam filter rules I used with KMail 1 for 
years, and I am quite confident that my mails are safe now, I tend to ignore 
anything in .xsession-errors from Akonadi (see bug # 319226). Maybe cause I do 
not want to loose that confidence.


I had at least two migration attempts back then. So I agree, migrating from 
KMail 1 to 2 can be very painful and I think its nothing a casual mail user is 
even able to do. I think a user friendly mail client can do way better than 
that.

But I also think KDEPIM is lacking developer manpower. So unless I take the 
time myself or KDEPIM somehow attracts other developers I expect migration to 
stay where it is. Well and at some time everyone uses KMail 2 and then there 
aren´t any migration issues regarding KMail 1 to KMail 2 anymore. For now I 
have a big large question mark regarding the Debian KDE user base. Debian 
Wheezy still carries KDEPIM 1 – I think for a reason. One reason according to 
a Debian Qt/KDE packager was the amount of migration issues. In the current 
state of affairs I expect several huge mail threads to appear on debian-user-
german is stable Debian would use KMail 2 right now. And I even wouldn´t be 
surprised to see strong language in there.

That said, KDEPIM as of SC 4.10.4 is way better than previous versions. So 
there is clear progress. And Laurent Montel and others are addressing bugs as 
good as they can – even bugs that have been in KMail 1 for years! Still most 
of my bug reports have not even been answered to, but then I actually do not 
want to know the amount of bug reports regarding KMail 2 at the moment. It 
might be overwhelming and a bug squad day may be good. And I know my bug 
reports aren´t so easy to reproduce in 5 minutes.

I still plan to make a test setup, as I also want to find a way to enable 
CRM114 spam filtering again safely and do not want to afford any further mail 
loss on my production setup. But as think this takes huge amounts of time, I 
still did not take the time for it. I intend to. Still.

Thing is: I understand that KDEPIM developers need clear easy reproducers. But 
with the complexity of usual mail setups reproducing a bug or even just finding 
the cause of it can be difficult. I agree that Akonadi concepts can be quite 
overwhelming, but I do think using a database is an approach that makes *a lot 
of sense*. Others have been doing it. Including our Zimbra server in whose web 
interface I can access the first thousands mails of a >330000 mail folders in 
less than 10-20 seconds.

I also think Akonadi needs test suite tests for moving >10000 mails, filtering 
>10000 mails at once, filtering >10000 mails through an external application 
and insane stuff like that, cause I think that heavy weight tests like that are 
more likely to show up that wierd issues I reported with KMail-2 and my mail 
setup. I think Akonadi currently has *serious* performance issues with things 
like that, that are *not* related to MySQL itself.


Other than that, if MySQL needs huge amount of I/O on your system, I suggest 
to raise innodb buffer size. Especially with your 32 GB RAM I suggest to raise 
it to 500MB or even 1 GB to see whether it makes a difference and lower from 
there as long as you feel comfortable with it. You may also try to tune other 
parameters as with 32 GB you can give it plenty.

And if Akonadi is only thing accessing mail, you may reduce folder 
synchronization to startup of KMail or even disable it completely (as I will 
try now) for local maildir resource. This helped my POP3 setup a lot.

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