[notmuch] Asynchronous tagging

Jed Brown jed at 59A2.org
Sat Nov 21 10:35:39 PST 2009


I'm really enjoying notmuch, thanks!  I have a minor issue and a couple
observations worth noting.

1. Changing tags (like removing inbox/unread) has really high latency.
For example, notmuch-show-advance-marking-read-and-archiving takes 2 to
4 seconds (by comparison, this is as long as a vague search returning
1000+ threads).  I have about 100k messages in a maildir on
linux-2.6.31-6, ext4, xapian-1.0.17.  I tried switching to the
development version of xapian, but the notmuch configure didn't pick it
up (maybe it would still work though).  Is this a known issue?  Is it
worth making certain notmuch.el operations asynchronous to hide this
latency?

2. I have 'notmuch new' in an offlineimap postsync hook, but
notmuch-search-refresh-view occasionally complains that another process
has the lock (since I might press '=' when 'notmuch new' is running).
Waiting a moment and trying again works fine, but it would be nice to
clean this up eventually.

3. I had initially put 'notmuch new' in a cron job (instead of
offlineimap postsync hook) and new/search would sometimes complain about
missing files in the maildir.  The first time this happened, it did not
correct itself and I ended up reimporting the database (I had moved some
things around so I could have been at fault).  Since then I have seen
these errors on a couple occasions, but they always go away upon
rerunning 'notmuch new'.  My guess is that it has to do with offlineimap
changing flags so I moved 'notmuch new' to the postsync hook and have
not seen the errors since.  If it is important that notmuch never runs
concurrently with an offlineimap sync, it should eventually go in the
docs.


Thanks again,

Jed


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