Frustrating to use KMail with Akonadi 5.14.1 (20.04)

[Martin Steigerwald]

Frank Mehnert - 09.06.20, 10:10:43 CEST:
> 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.

Yeah, but if I wait a bit it does not help either. Today already two 
times within 2 minutes it thought it would be a fun idea to synchronize 
kdepim-users maildir folder with that about 13000 mails. I have been in 
that folder just half a minute ago, but what does it do? It synchronized 
it again!

And that with just Akonadi messing with those folders anyway. It should 
know which mails are there. In my point of view 99,9% of those folder 
synchronizations are completely unnecessary, at least for local maildir. 
It has inotify watches on it and if it wants to know whether something 
changed in there during a time when it did not run, it can just check 
the modification time stamp of the folders involved, so I really do not 
get the point.

> 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.

Sometimes I just terminated the akonadi_maildir_resource process. It 
immediately makes KMail responsible again, however if you do this more 
than three times, Akonadi considers it as broken and won't start it 
anymore.

> 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).

Nope. It doesn't. Or if it does, its still unbearable with it. I am 
using PostgreSQL 12.

Ciao,
-- 
Martin