GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 589245
very sluggish with lots of news groups and vfolders
Last modified: 2014-04-27 03:27:49 UTC
As you probably know by now, I am a power-user of vfolders. They are wonderful for organizing, sorting and prioritizing mail (and news) from many sources. I have also taken to reading all of the mailing lists I am interested in via gmane's NNTP server. Now that I have quite a number of NNTP groups in various vfolders including my "general, unread" vfolder, I am finding using that vfolder quite sluggish. Currently the "unread count" of such a folder is 51733, but I don't really trust that number and estimate that it's probably much higher. My folders.db is currently 468,376,576 big. I realize that this is a lot of messages and a lot of database entries, but wasn't the conversion to sqlite3 for the folder store specifically to answer scaling issues? It does not seem to be scaling very well. So here's my challenge to whomever's bailiwick this vfolder/sqlite3/scaling issue is: subscribe to all of your mailing lists via gmane (and post and respond there as well if you wish, or don't -- maintain your direct e-mail copy if you like) and put all of those subscriptions into a vfolder (surely being the vfolder developer, you use them extensively) and try to use that vfolder on an ongoing basis. For reference, I have 28 gmane groups I subscribe to with 18 of them in a vfolder I call "active newsgroups" and then the "active newsgroups" vfolder is included in my "general, unread" vfolder. It's this "general, unread" vfolder that I find sluggish to use. Simply waiting for the message summary pane to paint when I select it takes several seconds. Navigating from one message has a noticeable lag. Waiting for the next message to be displayed after deleting the current message can take a few seconds.
One more thing I wanted to add: if I select a group of messages and then delete them, it can take many (sometimes 10s of) seconds to realize that change in the summary pane. While I am waiting, the entries that I deleted are blank and the Date fields (Received and Date) have ? in them. On the status bar it says that it's generating the message list.
patch committed in bug 564388 should help a lot for news groups.
(In reply to comment #2) > patch committed in bug 564388 should help a lot for news groups. The sluggishness described in this bug is with that patch already applied. So more work is needed to weed out the remaining performance issues. Is there anything I can do to help identify where that work needs doing?
Is this bug not going to get any attention at all? This lack of scalability of evolution is a fundamental defect. I am ready and willing to provide whatever info you need to help debug. Evolution is a huge consumer of my CPU now and has got my disk spinning almost constantly. Very frequently the status bar says "Generating message list (...)"
Hi gnome-bugs, if you have time, could you please check again whether this issue still happens in Evolution 3.8.5 and update this report by adding a comment and changing the "Version" field and provide information about your distribution? Thanks a lot.
Closing as OBSOLETE per lack of response from reporter. Please reopen if this still happens in 3.12.x or 3.10.x.
The problem doesn't seem as bad but maybe that's just because I don't really use vfolders so much any more. They became quite useless when the ability to delete messages in them was removed. Such a pity. They were one of the crown-jewels of Evolution IMHO. I had never been able to organize and keep on top of my many folders and mail accounts as easily as I could with vfolders. But now they are quite useless.