Unhappy with Akonadi

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi!

I use PostgreSQL.

Still it often enough is unbearable.

One IMAP account that I limited from 30 to 7 days server-side by using 
"find -delete", cause Akonadi would just insist to synchronize inbox 
needlessly a lot of times, blocking deleting mails and moving mails in 
KMail for even for local maildir access for minutes and longer.

Then I thought it would be better and it was. I updated from Akonadi/
KDEPIM 21.08 to 21.08.1 and forgot the usual

chmod 000 /usr/bin/akonadi_indexing_agent

I do in order to prevent Akonadi from being occupied with itself for 
minutes and longer before responding to anything else.

What I got right now after deleting a few mails, is "synchronizing 
trashbin" for a minute or longer. Mind you, there were just 5 mails in 
there. And again on a delete request it greyed out the mails without 
finishing the deletion of those for minutes.

I did not confirm it, but as this ThinkPad T14 AMD Ryzen 4750 Pro 8 core 
with 32 GiB and Samsung 980 Pro monster machine had its fan on loud, my 
suspicion was, that akonadi_indexing_agent would again blocking out 
KMail and causing an insane load on PostgreSQL.

Honestly, I really thought a lot about switching it all over to 
Evolution or some other mail client or even notmuch and some GUI client 
for it, in case there is any, in the last weeks to months. But given the 
complexity of my setup it also takes quite some effort.

I really think whenever KMail needs more than 5-10 seconds to even 
respond to a simple request of deleting, moving or viewing a *single* 
mail, this is simply a bug of the software given the hardware I throw at 
it. The user always goes first. All the background activity has to stay 
in the background at all times. Akonadi gets this one utterly wrong.

It feels out of my area of knowledge and skills to fix it myself, I felt 
intimidated by the code base the last time I digged a bit into it and 
was only successful in fixing a performance issue with maildir resource 
cause I got considerable help and support back then, which of cause 
caused quite some effort and time of the KDEPIM developers helping me.

Akonadi and Baloo are the two major pain points with Plasma and KDE 
applications for me.

They don't work in a satisfying way. And have not worked in a satisfying 
way for years. Sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse, but there 
have almost always been problems with it. But maybe instead of 
complaining, in a sense, again, it is better for me to switch over to 
another solution for mail and for desktop search. I would like to avoid 
that, but given my skill set and my estimation on how much time I would 
need to even understand enough of Akonadi to see why it is doing what is 
is doing… I see not much of another choice.

Well at least for Baloo it kind of worked to tell it to leave alone the 
content of files.

I am really willing to spend some money to have this fixed once and for 
all. It would be good to have fixing these pain points as a KDE goal. But 
I do not see my contributions to KDE and Plasma as large enough to 
actually have a vote on that.

Best,
-- 
Martin