Hi, I have been using kmail (version 1) with tons of emails more than 60k and everything was a breeze.

Recently on FreeBSD and arch linux I have upgraded to kmail2 and hell arrived to my workstation.

Now with kmail2 receiving more than 1k email per day and having more than 60k emails in various folders, makes kmail2 soooo slow.

I've checked and most of the time it is akonadi that is using all CPU and the system crawls.

If I try to delete my TRASH folder, oh my GOD I can't work for 5 to 10 minutes everything freezes, and again akonadi/mysql is the responsible.

My main question is, how to optimize akonadi/mysql to stop kmail2 becoming so slow? I'd like to have the performance of kmail1.

This occurs in a workstation with 8GB of RAM (64bits) and a core 2 duo at 2,3Ghz, the hardisk is a Corsair SSD.

Thank you

Which version of KMail2/KDE do you have installed?

bcooksley wrote:Which version of KMail2/KDE do you have installed?

Hi, right now i'm on KDE 4.8.00 and kmail 4.8.0

If I try to delete a lot of messages, it looks like the system freezes because of kmail, akonadi and mysql processing.

This some times can take from 1 to 2 minutes, and then the system becomes responsive again.

When I receive a lot of emails if I try to browse the emails, it takes some times more than 10 seconds to show the content of the email.

Any sugestion to optimize or (hope) that it is possible to disable akonadi and mysql ?


Sorry for taking so long to respond but I've forgotten to enable the notify when a reply is posted

For example right now, my system is irresponsible.

TOP shows:

Cpu(s): 95.0%us, 4.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 8181760k total, 5675560k used, 2506200k free, 139528k buffers
Swap: 8388604k total, 0k used, 8388604k free, 3700340k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2355 xxxx 20 0 2054m 304m 52m R 94 3.8 7:28.10 kmail
1070 xxxx 20 0 1416m 342m 6232 S 58 4.3 36:19.99 mysqld
1132 xxxx 20 0 306m 54m 19m R 14 0.7 4:29.73 akonadi_nepomuk
1068 xxxx 20 0 1246m 94m 7028 S 13 1.2 5:21.17 akonadiserver
1129 xxxx 20 0 366m 108m 16m S 8 1.4 4:00.90 akonadi_agent_l


This on a system with a 120GB SSD disk, 8 Gigabytes of RAM and a Core 2 Duo E6420

It seems that you are currently experiencing issues with the performance of changes which require altering a large number of items. Unfortunately work is still underway and needed to optimise Akonadi to handle these operations.

The high load you experience from KMail/MySQL/Akonadi is expected in this case. Future versions will likely include some optimisations which may improve upon the speed and resource consumption these events require.

At this time, the only way to not use Akonadi/MySQL is by using KMail 1.x - which is no longer supported. You can acquire this from the enterprise4 branch if FreeBSD makes it available.

Hi, thank you for the feedback about the problem.

I will try to compile Kmail 1

I too have noticed that Kontact and Kmail have loaded like molasses in January.
It did get worse with the update to 4.8.1.

With a little trial and error, I have got Kmail and Kontact to load much faster:

1.Akonadi Mail Resources:
Along with the Local Folders Resource, also add Kmail Mail Resource. These will be probably be pointed to the same folder but it will not hurt anything. It may seem to be redundant, but it did seem to help.

2. Rebuild Nepomuk:
My Nepomuk indexing was probably corrupt from too much tinkering. What I did was go to System Settings/Desktop Search. Turn off the Semantic Desktop. Next go to where your KDE Apps are (Mine on Kubuntu is .kde/share/apps) and in case of restoring the Nepomuk directory I just renamed it Nepomuk.badone.

Now reboot and back to System Settings. Turn back on Nepomuk (Semantic Settings On) This will rebuild the Nepomuk Directory.

Now try Kmail. It should load faster.

Hope this Helps!

Also suffering from this. On my netbook, with disconnected IMAP, clicking folders takes a few seconds to show the message list. Then clicking an unread message, it takes up to 5 seconds before the content is shown and the message is marked read.

When deleting spam, and quickly pressing "Del" several times, the messages get deleted eventually, but are shown unread in the trash folder. Annoying.

Never experienced this with Thunderbird. But I also never used kmail 1.x so I cannot comment on a comparison.

Kubuntu_Usr wrote:What I did was go to System Settings/Desktop Search. Turn off the Semantic Desktop. Next go to where your KDE Apps are (Mine on Kubuntu is .kde/share/apps) and in case of restoring the Nepomuk directory I just renamed it Nepomuk.badone.

Now reboot and back to System Settings. Turn back on Nepomuk (Semantic Settings On) This will rebuild the Nepomuk Directory.

Now try Kmail. It should load faster.

Hope this Helps!

Fantastic, Kontact was becoming unusable but this one change worked for me.

Thanks

Nick

Hey,

this helped me too.

After plasma-desktop this is the second kde-program i have had to cleanup the config files to make it work fluid again...
isn't it possible to automate this? or at last give a warning to the user?

Unfortunately it is difficult to determine automatically when configuration files have become broken.
Also, it requires the full reconfiguration of the application by the user.

Unfortunately, at the end of 2014 I can conclude that KDE remains the same slow it was a few years ago. Nepomuk now replaced by another thing and kmail freezes exactly the same way despite of that.

Every time I receive new email it takes from 5 to 10 seconds before kmail is able to show me its content. In the htop I can see that akonadi and mysql do use a lot of CPU and cause hard IO WAIT. But I do not have too many messages, no more than 100k in all my folders and accounts. Not mentioning slow boot and the lags it causing during akonadi start.

All that in a workstation with 30G of memory, 8 cores i7 CPU with a 10k rpm WD Velociraptor HDD (not SSD but shows some good performance still).

Being a software engineer and working with mysql also I think developers' hands are simply growing from a wrong place. Unfortunately, with akonadi I can't simply remove the old database and create a new one since that will affect all my other applications that utilize it.

First of all, while frustration can be understandable, the use of expletives, censored or not, is not: please re-read the forum rules and the KDE Code of Conduct.

Secondly, you may want to provide more information on your configuration and PIM version to be able to pinpoint the issue, otherwise it'll be hard to figure out the exact problem (I can't reproduce, for one).

@einar, you're right, just updated my post, sorry about that.

In 4.13.x there is a known bug with HTML mail of certain types that cause exactly what you describe. Did not exist in 4.12 and is gone in 4.14

heaven wrote:Unfortunately, at the end of 2014 I can conclude that KDE remains the same slow it was a few years ago. Nepomuk now replaced by another thing and kmail freezes exactly the same way despite of that.

Every time I receive new email it takes from 5 to 10 seconds before kmail is able to show me its content. In the htop I can see that akonadi and mysql do use a lot of CPU and cause hard IO WAIT. But I do not have too many messages, no more than 100k in all my folders and accounts. Not mentioning slow boot and the lags it causing during akonadi start.