Hi,

I’m using evolution on my notebook, using only IMAP folders. My hard drive is configured to spin down and laptop-mode is enabled, causing file write not necessary spin up the drive.

But I noticed that working with evolution causes a lot of single short accesses to the hard drive. Here is what I found, using strace -e open,close,fsync:

[pid  4676] close(15)                   = 0
[pid  4676] open("/home/jojo/.evolution/mail/config/.#folder-tree-expand-state.xml", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0600) = 15
[pid  4676] fsync(15)                   = 0
[pid  4676] close(15)                   = 0
[pid  4676] close(15)                   = 0
[pid  4676] open("/home/jojo/.evolution/mail/config/.#et-expanded-imap:__mail_40joachim-breitner.de@mail.nomeata.de_INBOX_Mailinglists_Blogs_planet_20Karlsruhe", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0600) = 15
[pid  4676] fsync(15)                   = 0
[pid  4676] close(15)                   = 0

I can understand that evolution would fsync _important_ files, such as local mail folders. But these files are very non-critical and do not warrant an immediate write to the hardware, at least not more immediate as the user wants other data written to the hard drive.

Please, if possible, reduce the usage of fsync for non-critical files, to help users reduce power consumption and harddrive wear.