[kdepim-users] frozen "Retrieving Folder Contents" (RFC) screen

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hello,

I'm using KMail (through Kontact) on both a (still) fast OS X laptop (4.13.3 with kdelibs 4.14.3 and akonadi 1.13.1) and a slow, kick-around netbook under Kubuntu 14.04 (PIM git/4.14 with kdelibs 4.14.2 and akonadi git/1.13).

On both platforms, but mostly on the "slowboat", I too often get into a situation where all KMail's background processes seem to work fine (folder synchronisation), but the application itself is locked in the "Retrieving Folder Contents" (RFC) screen. Apparently a retrieval job is blocked somewhere waiting for who knows what. The only way out is either to restart Kontact or all of akonadi (akonadictl restart), preferably both. If I restart only akonadi I will end up with the mail filter resource locked at 0% progress for a very long time (or indefinitely), requiring another akonadi restart. (This is something that also happens when I restart akonadi when everything works fine, with Kontact running.)

The freeze happens most often after I wake the system from sleep, or when I come back to it after a long absence during which I either took Kontact offline or it remained waiting for IMAP authentication (kwallet unlock) because a connection timed out.

For me this started with PIM 4.13 on OS X, but I don't recall having seen it with that version on Kubuntu, at least not as long as I took Kontact offline before leaving a system unattended. But that was more to prevent ending up with too many simultaneous connections to my main gmail account.

I've exchanged with Dan Vrátil about this, off list, apparently it's not an unknown issue that doesn't have a good solution yet. The fact it happens most predictably after a wake-from-sleep on the slowest system, i.e. at a time when many background processes become active at once to catch up, makes me think there might be some race condition because of a sub-optimal mutex/semaphore/lock/whatever on a shared resource.

How many people on here have similar experiences, and how do you handle this situation if it occurs?

Regards,
René
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