A few days ago Kontact 4.4.2 (under Kubuntu 10.04) started to cause heavy harddisk activity after every start for about 4-5 minutes. During this time CPU usage by Kontact is about 2-5% but the harddisk activity is unmistakable and Kontact (and the whole system) is rather unresponsive. After those 4-5 minutes (or if I close Kontact) all is well. I'm not aware of any settings changes I might have done. Upgrading to version 4.4.5 from the Ubuntu ppa didn't help.

Kontact is started by this file saved in ~/.kde/Autostart in order to avoid the known Akonadi problems:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/akonadictl start
sleep 10
kontact


There are no Akonadi errors, and my contacts are okay. akonadictl status gives:

Akonadi Control: running
Akonadi Server: running
Akonadi Server Search Support: available (backend: Unknown)

Any idea what could be wrong?

When starting Kontact, try putting a delay before it, and open "top" in Konsole to see what is causing the CPU / IO load. You can use "iotop" to view load on the hard disk.

bcooksley wrote: You can use "iotop" to view load on the hard disk.

Thanks! I've followed your advice and found that there are 2 processes that cause high disk activity:

kontact with 1300 - 3300 K/s DISK READ
jbd2/sbd5-8 with 500 - 1600 K/s DISK WRITE

sdb5 is my home partition. I understand that jbd2 is the journaling block device used by ext4. The funny thing is that I hadn't had these problems up to some days ago. There are bugs related to jbd2 on launchpad - I will look if one applies to my case.

If you have other ideas how to fix this issue I'd be happy to read them

tlu wrote:Thanks! I've followed your advice and found that there are 2 processes that cause high disk activity:

kontact with 1300 - 3300 K/s DISK READ
jbd2/sbd5-8 with 500 - 1600 K/s DISK WRITE

I've added the noatime,nodiratime mount options to fstab, and the result is interesting: While the disk read numbers of kontact haven't changed much, jdb2 now appears only rarely in the iotop list, and if it does the disk write numbers have significantly decreased to about 2 - 15 K/s!

Although the responsiveness hasn't improved a lot, this measure seems to help a bit.

This indicates that Kontact is interfacing with files in small bursts. If you start the component applications of Kontact ( KAddressBook, KMail, etc ) which of them experiences this freeze? I suspect the KMail indexes are damaged ( can be repaired with no harm to your data )

bcooksley wrote: I suspect the KMail indexes are damaged ( can be repaired with no harm to your data )

Yes, it's definitely the Kmail component that's causing the disk activity. I had also thought about damaged indexes and rebuilt them for all my folders - but unfortunately to no avail. Disk read activity is still high and consequently it takes some minutes until Kmail starts fetching new mails.

Aside from damaged indexes I can't imagine other reasons. BTW, upgrading to KDE 4.5 didn't help, either.