My major issue with Akonadi: Blocking on user input

[Daniel Vrátil]

On Thursday, July 27, 2017 12:57:47 PM CEST Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Martin Steigerwald - 27.07.17, 12:43:
> > 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.
> 

I had a patch that implements a dynamic session pool for KMail, but it was 
causing a lot of quirks and weird behaviours. I'll see if I can revive it and 
fix the issues.


> I actually started that move mail operating for exactly that reason:
> 
> Whenever I clicked on the sent mail folder Akonadi first starts to
> synchronize its contents even when it did so just a minute ago. And then it
> blocks on user input. So I thought I move all mails from 2016 and older to
> an archive folder.
> 
> Seriously this behavior is just unacceptable. I don´t care whether the
> folder is fully synchronized… Akonadi can do it in the background and for
> sake of not wasting tons of server resources, local database resources and
> network bandwidth not just do it on every click on the folder (I want to
> disable that, but I can´t currently, see thread "synchronisation
> settings"). I just want to see that one mail that I sent… now.

Right-click the folder, go to Folder Properties -> Retrieval, uncheck "Use 
options from parent folder", uncheck "Synchronize when selecting folder".

> 
> So my plea to capable developers who know enough about Akonadi to actually
> understand it: Please fix this. Whenever I had a go at the source, I felt
> lost. I basically never really truly understood how the different
> components of Akonadi work with one another. I have a rough idea… but once
> as I wanted to find out on what occasions Akonadi starts a folder
> synchronisations I had a go at the source and just didn´t get it.
> 
> Thank you,


-- 
Daniel Vrátil
www.dvratil.cz | dvratil at kde.org
IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi, #fedora-kde)

GPG Key: 0x4D69557AECB13683
Fingerprint: 0ABD FA55 A4E6 BEA9r9A83 EA97 4D69 557A ECB1 3683
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kdepim-users/attachments/20170729/a45bc664/attachment.sig>