Hi ya!

Does anybody know what kmail is doing on the start? On fresh kde, my system use only 0.5G ram and 2.5G is free. When I start kontact, for the first minutes kmail is very slooooooooow, I can not work with it. Apart of that kmail takes rest of memory (~2.5G).

After few minutes, everything looks fine - but kmail still use all of the memory.

Do you have any idea how to fix it? Maybe kmail is upadating any database which is broken? Maybe anything else? I was using ~amd64, so I tought this was a proble. After reinsatling into amd64 (stable) - problem still the same. Maybe configuration file for kmail into /home directory?

My system:
Core 2 duo (T 5800)
3 GB ram
KDE 4.3.3

i'm also suffering from this. i'm pretty sure it's since i upgraded to kubuntu karmic koala 9.10. i always felt kmail had some performance issues but this is a killer. i clocked an hour to start up. ONE HOUR! so i moved the majority of my huge inbox to a local folder and turned off all filters (sux for some really active lists) and turned off encryption for receiving and sending. so i get better oerormance now. startup is about 15min. once it's all up it's still sluggish but usable i really do NOT want to switch but i tested thunderbird just to see if there's something screwy with my inbox and nope, thunderbird works super fast, faster than i've ever seen kmail work. i've been hoping for an update but other than this post i'm replying to i've not seen any mention of this problem so i had assumed it was something with my setup. now i'm not so sure. any ideas all?

Is your mail stored in mbox files? If so, that's the cause of your problem. mbox is fine for small mailboxes, but it gets slower and slower as they get bigger. If that is so, it would make sense to convert to using maildir files - it's easy to do and you lose no mail. The other possibility is to create new folders within KMail and use them to split the existing ones. How many messages do you keep in one folder? OTOH, if, as you say, Thunderbird is faster, you need to ask yourself if there is something in your KDE setup that could be causing it. Certainly it is not normal to have such long startup times.

i do have some older folders in mbox format. most are in maildir. i've not configured thunderbird to access those but since we're talking about my imap inbox, i don't think that's it. maybe kmail is doing something like indexing my mailboxes on startup. i'll convert any mbox folder just in case anyway. what in my kde config could cause such problems? also when (which version) did the akonadi server get into the mix in kmail? i know this one uses it and maybe that's a new element.

the more i use the more i just think it's just broken. sometimes it becomes unresponsive when i've left the inbox window for a bit. does anyone know with what version akonadi was first used? i'm suspecting it.

I experience the same problem for about 7-10 days now.

I run Ubuntu 9.10 (x86_64) on a system with AMD dual core CPU and 6 GB RAM, and I regularly install the proposed updates. I use gnome as desktop, but kmail as my mail reader. Kmail is in version 1.12.2.

All my folders are in maildir format. My mail directory is rather huge, however: it contains about 70,000 mails (=files), occupying 2,1 GB of disk space. The mails are sorted into many folders, and only very few exceed the amount of 1,000.

Start up seems not be affected for me, but something keeps kmail busy for a few minutes after it started--so busy that any click takes 10-30s for a response. Even downloading mails from a POP3 account is awfully slow, at only a few kB/s instead the expected > 200 kB/s. Most of the time, the hard disk is rattling like hell. (My memory print seems reasonable, at about 800 MB.) After these few minutes, kmail responds fast again, and the problems do not recur.

i can say that i have not had the same issues. i use kmail day in, day out on my work system. i prefer cached-imap, its a large email box, but i'll have to poke around to see if i can test performance at the 2gb threshold.

Versions
Qt: 4.5.3
KDE: 4.3.4 (KDE 4.3.4)
KMail: 1.12.4

Strangely enough, I did not encounter the described performance problems in the last few days. I have no idea what might have changed about my system--and I'm not confident either that the problems won't return ...

same here. i did a dist-upgrade last week and the problem went away. kmail is as responsive a ever. i do suspect some sort of partial move towards akonadi. i wished i had looked in my settings for it before but i've discovered an akonadi setup in system setting -> advanced -> akonadi configuration.

here's the output i think is relevant. i'll look into it but thought to share first. the whole output is too long to post. so then if akonadi fails, then kmail must default to the non-akonadi or "old" way of handling mail files. perhaps the new version that came with karmic didn't anticipate not having akonadi working and wasn't tested fully for that case. it was caught on the update.

so should i fix this or leave it now that kmail is working fine? why do we care about akonadi (other than it makes it easy for developers)?

Test 4: ERROR
--------

MySQL server log contains errors.
Details: The MySQL server error log file &apos;<a href='/home/stel/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/mysql.err'>/home/stel/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/mysql.err</a>&apos; contains errors.

File content of '/home/stel/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/mysql.err':
091109 23:55:17 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
091109 23:55:18 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 939165
091109 23:55:18 [Warning] Can't open and lock time zone table: Table 'mysql.time_zone_leap_second' doesn't exist trying to live without them
091109 23:55:18 [ERROR] Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.servers' doesn't exist
091109 23:55:18 [ERROR] Cannot open mysql.db
091109 23:55:18 [ERROR] Cannot open mysql.user
091109 23:55:18 [ERROR] Cannot open mysql.event
091109 23:55:18 [ERROR] Event Scheduler: An error occurred when initializing system tables.
091109 23:55:18 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi: ready for connections.
Version: '5.1.37-1ubuntu5-log' socket: '/home/stel/.local/share/akonadi/db_misc/mysql.socket' port: 0 (Ubuntu)
091110 7:55:18 [Warning] Aborted connection 3 to db: 'akonadi' user: 'stel' host: '' (Got timeout reading communication packets)
091110 7:55:18 [Warning] Aborted connection 4 to db: 'akonadi' user: 'stel' host: '' (Got timeout reading communication packets)
091110 7:55:19 [Warning] Aborted connection 6 to db: 'akonadi' user: 'stel' host: '' (Got timeout reading communication packets)
091110 7:55:19 [Warning] Aborted connection 7 to db: 'akonadi' user: 'stel' host: '' (Got timeout reading communication packets)
091110 7:55:20 [Warning] Aborted connection 9 to db: 'akonadi' user: 'stel' host: '' (Got timeout reading communication packets)
091110 7:57:00 [Warning] Aborted connection 8 to db: 'akonadi' user: 'stel' host: '' (Got timeout reading communication packets)
091112 20:06:36 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi: Normal shutdown

091112 20:06:36 InnoDB: Starting shutdown...
091112 20:06:40 InnoDB: Shutdown completed; log sequence number 0 1668658
091112 20:06:40 [Warning] Forcing shutdown of 1 plugins
091112 20:06:40 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi: Shutdown complete

well i nailed the akonadi problem with

http://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi#Apparmor

and kmail is still running super fine so that wasn't it. maybe we'll never know. i also don't think akonadi was exactly what i thought it was. i think kmail still grabs it's files the way it always did but with akonadi there's access to imap and maildir from other apps. but then i read kmail was migrating to completely use akonadi to access imap amd maildir files. maybe i have to configure akonadi to subscribe to those as resources. i'll leave that for another day.

KMail is not using Akonadi yet for its mail access. This is planned for 4.5 but it depends whether we can get this change finished in time for the feature freeze.

You won't have to change anything manually, KMail or a separate tool will do that for you.

Cheers,
_

Hello,
I've a similar problem.
I've a lot of mails (about 60.000)

After a few minutes of using hard disk and RAM kmail works fine.
I use kmail since 2005. Now I've installed a kubuntu 9.10 and I've restored my mails.
At the beginning all works fine, but from one week Kmail is really sloow and use a lot of Hard Disk.

My system:
Sony vaio VGN-SZ71MN/B
Intel core duo (T8100) 2.10 GHz
2GB RAM
200 GB HD

Thanks for any suggestions
Graffio