Frustrating to use KMail with Akonadi 5.14.1 (20.04)

[Frank Mehnert]

On Dienstag, 9. Juni 2020 09:52:46 CEST Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Martin Steigerwald - 05.06.20, 18:52:37 CEST:
> > This is a plea to any KDE developer who feels capable and willing of
> > doing so, to look at whether it would be possible to make Akonadi
> > great… not again, but for the first time… or whether it would be wise
> > to finally start over with a new approach.
> > 
> > It easily takes a minute or longer  to synchronize a mail folder with
> > just a few thousand mails. It is much, much, much slower than with
> > KMail with Akonadi 19.08. During that time Akonadi does not respond
> > to KMail requesting the payload of a mail I click on.
> > 
> > Which means: I have to wait a minute, sometimes longer for being able
> > to read a mail in a folder I just selected.
> 
> - Open a folder with just about 13000 mails
> - Click on it for the first time in a KMail/Akonadi session or after a
> while you used it last again
> - Wait for one minute for Akonadi to deliver the payload of a mail I
> like to reply to to KMail.
> 
> This is unbearable.
> 
> I do not remember when it ever has been that bad.

I experience similar problems and I can agree that this got notable
worse with the recent switch from 19.08 to 20.04.

When this happens then the maildir resource of Akonadi is busy for a
long time. Usually I can work around this problem if I don't switch to
quickly between folders.

If kmail/akonadi went into that state then sometimes even kmail does
not terminate and eventually I kill it, do stop + wait + restart
Akonadi and then kmail is responsive again.

I use the standard Debian configuration with exactly one mysql (aka
MariaDB) instance running. This is my laptop and there is only one user
active.

Please don't start another MySQL-does-not-work-use-PostgreSQL-instead
thread. I know very busy MySQL databases. PostgreSQL might improve the
situation but IMO it's very unlikely that the origin of the problem is
the database engine (it could be with SQLite of course).

Frank