Advogato: Blog for robertc

Dear evolution, Why are you taking 180 seconds (+- 20) to open mails ?

Dear user, I'm reading message metadata for every message in that folder, then for all the new mail that arrived while I was doing that.

Dear evolution, sqlite is good, not reading the entire maildirs in to filter mail, or open a folder, would be better.

iotop says:
  TID  PRIO  USER     DISK READ  DISK WRITE  SWAPIN     IO>
   COMMAND
14797 be/4 robertc     4.30 M/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 %
evolution

Dear user, I know, but I'm still the program I was before sqlite... what to do? (bugs have been filed, tuits are currently lacking).

Dear evolution, I see you have a large db, but perhaps its just your cache size?


$ ls -l
/home/robertc/.evolution/mail/imap/robertc@localhost/folders.db
-rw-r--r-- 1 robertc robertc 953131008 2009-08-06 12:23
/home/robertc/.evolution/mail/imap/robertc@localhost/folders.db
$ sqlite3
/home/robertc/.evolution/mail/imap/robertc@localhost/folders.db
SQLite version 3.6.14.2
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> pragma default_cache_size;
2000
sqlite> pragma default_cache_size=50000;
$ sqlite3
/home/robertc/.evolution/mail/imap/robertc@localhost/folders.db
SQLite version 3.6.14.2
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> pragma default_cache_size;
50000

Dear user, oooo, that feels good.

2000 - the default, is 2MB of cache. evolution was using 535m of actual memory before, this gives it 25 times the cache size. My theory is that the still present read-all-message-info limitations in evolution were causing cache thrashing. (A DB doesn't help at all unless one actually is looking at less data :).

6 Aug 2009 robertc » (Master)