GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 729240
IMAP folder list loaded slowly on start up
Last modified: 2014-09-11 07:40:23 UTC
I just upgraded from 3.8 to 3.12 (Debian unstable) and noticed a regression that is annoying every morning: With 3.8, when starting evolution, the folder list was immediately present. With 3.12, it first sits there for what feels like half a minute, saying that it loads the folders. I’m using a dovecot IMAP server and I have roughly 250 folders.
Another observation that may help narrowing it down: I have a folder with a few unread mails. Previously, I would look at the folder list, and the little star on the folder icon would disappear. When I quit evolution and start it again, that start would still be gone. Now, when I restart evolution, the little star is shown again, although the folder did not change at all. So one guess would be that evolution fails to read its previous folder list and state, so re-syncs the folder list from the server. Maybe a problem with upgrading from 3.8 to 3.12 directly? I am tempted to just remove the files in ~/.cache/evolution and see if the problem disappears, although that would make debugging it harder...
Got annoyed, removed ~/.cache/evolution, problem disappeared...
Hmm, spoke too soon. Problem came back. Maybe some corruption in the cache?
JFTR: Still in 3.12.4.
Looking at a CAMEL_DEBUG=imapx log I can see that it starts fetching lots of statuses about individual mails, and even fetches some mails, while I am still waiting for the folder list to appear. I recall that in earlier versions, it would show me the folder list and _then_ start updating and fetching mail in the background. I assembled a few representative and non-privacy-invading parts of the log, see attachement. I especially find [imapx:A] Eep, after QRESYNC we're out of sync. total 14972 / 14972, unread 1 / 14960, modseq 52629 / 52629 followed by 14960 FETCHEs worrying.
Created attachment 281188 [details] CAMEL_DEBUG=imapx output (extracts)
Hmm, it might also be related to gnome-keyring-daemon. At least I just changed something in that direction (not quite sure what) and now I get the folder list quicker. Or maybe there is some other condition triggering the bad behavior (maybe unclean shutdowns?). I’ll continue to observe the issue.
Problem seems to have disappeared; possibly related to gnome-keyring-daemon. Since noone else reported the same and in the interest of keeping the open bug count low, closing this for now.
Still hard to pin point precisely, but it seems it got worse from 3.12.4 to 3.12.5.