[notmuch] 25 minutes load time with emacs -f notmuch

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

Disclaimer: I'm using vim, in combination with mutt for email, for years, but
never dealt with emacs. Please have this in mind and spot any emacs user errors
in this report. :)

I have first seen notmuch several weeks ago as it seems a silent project. Being
more then happy now that it envolves quickly and a real developer community
builds around it.

But now to my problem. Getting m mail indexed was easy enough:

stefan at excalibur:~$ du -chs not-much-mail/
1.5G    not-much-mail/
1.5G    total
stefan at excalibur:~$ time notmuch new
Found 103677 total files.
Processed 103677 total files in 42m 30s (40 files/sec.).
Added 100899 new messages to the database (not much, really).

Tip: If you have any sub-directories that are archives (that is,
they will never receive new mail), marking these directories as
read-only (chmod u-w /path/to/dir) will make "notmuch new"
much more efficient (it won't even look in those directories).

real    43m0.943s
user    22m46.513s
sys     0m39.418s


I put (require  'notmuch) in my ~/.emacs ans start emacs with the -f notmuch
option to enter the notmuch mode. What happends then is that a notmuch process
gets started and emacs waits for the return.

23649 pts/1    SN+    0:00      |       \_ emacs -f notmuch
23651 ?        RNs    0:03      |           \_ /usr/local/bin/notmuch search
--sort=oldest-first tag:inbox

Sadly that takes around 25 minutes here on an Intel Core2Duo notbeook (Thinkpad
X200s). I tried this several times now. CPU load was low (~10%) during this time
so it is mostly IO bound.

I checked that I don't have any big files like mutt header caches left and all
my mail is stored in maildir format diretcly from offlineimap. I'm more then
happy to test any patches on this issue or do some debugging myself if I get
some hints where to look.

regards
Stefan Schmidt