My major issue with Akonadi: Blocking on user input

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hello!

It is reported in bugtracker as various issues (see below for some I reported, 
I bet there are many more).

During *whatever* large operation be it folder synchronisation, moving 
thousands of mails or whatever else, Akonadi blocks out any interactive 
requests made by me as a KMail user.

So basically Akonadi still does not fully fulfill its initial promise:

Always keep the UI of KMail responding to user input. Granted the KMail UI 
does not block completely, but when it can´t do anything useful anymore like 
displaying a mail, its quite useless to me.

I just today saw it again while moving thousands of mails from a large IMAP 
folder to an archival folder on the same IMAP account, which unfortunatly is 
hosted by Exchange. While the background operation takes place and Akonadi 
just uses about 20% of CPU during sending lots of IMAP commands (so mostly 
Akonadi IMAP resource active) KMail doesn´t display *any* mail I click on 
anymore, presenting me with the infamous "Retrieving contents" blocker 
message.

In my opinion beside stability issues – I don´t have any of those currently – 
this is the single most major issue with Akonadi.

Its basically throws us back to the area of single tasking. We have an 
operating that does multitasking really good.

What do you think? For me this is the single most annoying issue of Akonadi in 
all of the years I used it.

If I click on a mail, I mean it. Display the contents already. Now. Same goes 
with folders and so on.

As long as this is not fixed I think users will be tempted to go elsewhere. I 
certainly feel tempted to. That I am still with KMail just is due to KMails 
suberb usability, feature set… and the fact that I at least for my private 
setup I store years and years and years of mails in it.

Background tasks need to be background tasks, they should *never ever*, I 
repeat *never ever* block user input.


[Akonadi] [Bug 334206] New: While maildir resources synchronrizes a folder 
KMail blocks on switching to a different folder

[Akonadi] [Bug 367892] New: During folder synchronisation Akonadi blocks out 
other operations like deleting or viewing mails

[Akonadi] [Bug 364114] New: moving a folder within one maildir resource is 
extremely slow and inefficient

Thanks,
-- 
Martin