ok, maybe i won't find any devs to back akonadi out of kde-pim after all

[Martin Steigerwald]

Good morning Paul.

Paul Vixie - 20.03.18, 23:49:
> Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> ...
> 
> > There are issues at some time and I sometimes still do a akonadictl
> > restart, although I am quite confident that most of the time Akonadi
> > would just need some time to get back to me – sometimes I just do not
> > want to wait this long. Also I still have issues with mail indexing for
> > my huge private mail setup. Currently akonadi_indexing_agent goes about
> > reindexing all mail folders there, cause it for some reason does not
> > think it has indexed them already which it has. This drags down the
> > performance of this nice laptop with dual SSD BTRFS RAID 1 – BTRFS may
> > easily affect the performance negatively, as database based workloads
> > suffer on it, even on SSDs – + 16 GiB RAM a lot. At the moment I just
> > killall the process until Akonadi does not restart it anymore in that
> > case. Once I have upgraded to KDEPIM 17.12 I want to remove that more
> > than 6 GiB large search_db folder and let it have one go at reindexing
> > everything from scratch. Dan also has a plan about improving this. The
> > current way the indexing works unfortunately is highly, highly
> > inefficient.
> > 
> > So its certainly not perfect for me, but definitely usable. I am sad that
> > it does not seem to work out for you at the moment. You may want to
> > describe your setup, maybe I or others have some tips for you to
> > consider. I do use MariaDB with 1 GiB of InnoDB buffer pool size and in
> > my subjective impression this helps a lot with performance. I usually
> > notice it quite quickly when Akonadi overwrites this change to the MySQL
> > configuration due to an update.
> martin, your story is perfect and i wouldn't want you to change a word
> of it.
> 
> your dedication of human time, your availability of human talent, and
> your willingness to allocate machine resources... is completely absurd.
> 
> if kmail is for people like you, then it's done, and no reason to worry
> about any remaining database issues.
> 
> i spend approximately 1% of the time, talent, and gigabytes on Postbox
> that you describe here, and like you i receive thousands of e-mails per day.
> 
> i need kontact to Just Work, without giving it an SSD and 16GBytes of
> RAM to live in.
> 
> perhaps that's where the disconnect lies.

I told you that the current situation is not perfect, far from it. Yet, from 
your initial posts I got the impression that KMail is simply unusable for you. 
Now I am not so sure about that anymore.

Also, Kontact in itself does not need all of the 16 GiB. In fact I have two 
Plasma sessions running at once and the memory is still often nearly 
completely used. After the hibernation this night, the laptop uses about 5 GiB 
in RAM and about 1,6 GiB in swap (due to the hibernation process, not due to 
any real need for swap during run time). Usually the machine has more than 
half of its RAM just available for caching.

Of course I applaud that you want to spend some of your money to improve your 
situation with KMail and Akonadi and I think this can work. I had my employer 
spend some money on the – still somewhat dated – laptop. This did also work. 
And I spent some of my time to help improving the current situation.

I don´t see how any of these approaches is right or wrong. They are just 
different. I am also willing to give some money, that is not the point… 
However what I noticed that from all of my mail writing as of yesterday, you 
just picked that which you could complain about it. This is a perfect way to 
give up any power on really improving or changing the current situation. It is 
absolutely your choice, but I know that blaming will not do any good to 
improve your current situation. Blaming always fixes the current situation in 
place. It does absolutely nothing to motivate anyone to change the situation. 
If KDEPIM developers work on improving Akonadi + KDEPIM it is not because of 
the blaming, but despite of it.

As I aim at carefully choosing how to spend my time, other than what you 
suggest with your mail, I do not see any point in continuing this discussion 
any further as long as it is just about blaming, blaming and then some more 
blaming from your side.

If you want to be unhappy, that is entirely and solely your choice. We all 
know KDEPIM is not there yet, including its developers. Even tough I used 
Thunderbird myself, and while it was a quite bit faster at that time where I 
still struggled a lot with KDEPIM, it still used quite a lot of resources and 
the program was somewhat unusable during retrieving a lot of mails. Maybe 
Postbox improved on this, maybe newer Thunderbird versions improved on this, 
but so can KDEPIM + Akonadi. Even with Trojitá I had issues as I tested it for 
an article I wrote – I easily managed to wait for the application also there. 
The only software that excelled at handling that much mail, was Zimbra, but 
this is running on a server 24/7, so the client does not have to do very much. 
It opened a folder with +450000 mails in a few seconds by using all kinds of 
tricks, like just showing the most recent several thousand mails and loading 
more as I scroll down. A trick that developers also plan for KDEPIM + Akonadi, 
but it needs server-side handling of threading, i.e. that Akonadi handles the 
threading in the background and also saves it, so it does not have to do it 
again and again and again.

If you choose to act upon one of the constructive choices I detailed to you, I 
am more than happy to support you. If you just want to continue to vent your 
frustration, I am out. I got that you are frustrated, I understand it, but as 
I told blaming does not work. I did that myself often enough to know this to 
be true.

Thank you,
-- 
Martin