[Kde-pim] PIM is not good. Would adding an extra RC help?

[Mark Gaiser]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Martin Steigerwald <Martin at lichtvoll.de> wrote:
> Hi Albert,
>
> I am mostly a user of KDEPIM, but since I experienced quite some performance
> issues and did some analysis and reports every now and then, I thought I share
> my findings.
>
> Am Samstag, 5. April 2014, 16:40:24 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
>> ** Please CC me and r-t list, i'm not subscribed to pim list. **
>>
>> Hello guys, as I hope you all know this Wednesday we are supposed to tag the
>> final release for 4.13.
>>
>> I am sending this email to ask for opinions on the value of adding an extra
>> RC and delaying the 4.13.0 release for at least a week.
>>
>> I'm going to explain why I'd like this to happen.
>>
>> Since the update to 4.13 Beta I've been having lots of CPU and I/O problems
>> in pim related stuff, most notably akonadi_baloo_indexer,
>> akonadi_maildir_resource & friends.
>>
>> On every release i've complained on IRC to be told "oh yes, we just fixed
>> this thing and will be available on the next release".
>>
>> But here I am, using 4.13 RC and with even KMail closed
>> mysqld+akonadiserver+akonadi_maildir_resource are using 100% of one of my
>> CPU cores and writing/reading around 10MB/s to my slow disks.
>
> So you are using a POP3 setup? Or how is the maildir resource filled on your
> setup? How big is it?
>
> I reported several bugs regarding slowness of maildir resource with lots of
> folders with lots of mails in it, including a report of
> akonadi_maildir_resource hogging up one Intel Sandybridge core on a Dual SSD
> BTRFS RAID 1 setup for several minutes after filtering about 100 mails into
> their folders[1]. And one for MySQL tuning, but at least from my observation
> the issue isn´t MySQL here, I thought so first, but I am not convinced after a
> deeper look at show innodb engine in MySQL is doing. See recent thread in pim-
> ml as well[3]. I am keen to look at it some more, but after spending quite a
> lot of time on analysing I needed a break. Well some other things Mark
> found[4]
>

Oh wow, i wasn't expecting to see someone link to my blog post :)

Please don't take my blog as an example for performance issues in
Akonadi. I'm still trying to figure out Akonadi internals, why it
works as it works and how one might optimize it. I am - by far -
capable in tweaking Akonadi or fixing issues. All i can do (and try to
do in the blog post) is finding hotspots that could be optimized.

Then again, what i found was just starting Akonadi. It wasn't even in
the indexing or any pop3/imap related stuff.

As for the general question from Albert.
I too noticed akonadi using up a lot of CPU for quite a long time when
just having one maildir with 80.000 mails. Yes, it is fixed right now
but was broken in the beta's and rc. But even then, RC should be
"ready to release if nothing major is found". Something was obviously
found (and fixed) so that would justify another RC to make sure it's
all working properly now.

Added to that is the addition of Baloo. The general Baloo impression
should be good for the users. If it's causing 100% CPU hangs for
minutes or even hours then users will start to complain again.

If it where up to me then i'd go for another RC, but i hardly do
anything in the akonadi/pim world besides using it's API and software
so people actually developing it should cast their vote imho.