[notmuch] Notmuch performance problems on OSX

[Oliver Charles]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 11:16 PM, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> Hi Oliver, welcome to notmuch!
>
> On Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:30:48 +0000, Oliver Charles <oliver.g.charles at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> I've installed the latest notmuch from Git at this time of writing,
>> along with Xapian from SVN head. However, just tagging a single thread
>> with only one message seems to take too long:
>>
>> $ time notmuch tag +dissertation thread:7dc536441e6deade4256a46d46451221
>>
>> real  0m0.812s
>> user  0m0.022s
>> sys   0m0.037s
>
> Things work quite a bit faster than that on my machine:
>
> $ time notmuch tag +foo id:5641883d1001140730l22832715ld6bdc95c9938d314 at mail.gmail.com
>
> real    0m0.024s
> user    0m0.012s
> sys     0m0.004s
>
> But that could just be system differences.

Possibly, though my machine is more than capable of what it's doing -
a Q6600 with 4gb RAM

>> And tagging all my messages is really horrible:
>>
>> $ time notmuch tag +foobar tag:inbox
>>
>> real  0m5.076s
>> user  0m3.688s
>> sys   0m0.105s
>
> For this operation, I can't really compare. How many messages are you
> tagging? Here's that operation for me with 525 messages in my inbox:

A few thousand (4k, I believe)

>> That xapian-svn was built from svn HEAD right now, so I'm assuming it
>> contains the #250 fix (http://trac.xapian.org/changeset/13808)
>
> Which I think means that things could have been even *much* slower
> before. ;-)
>
> The Xapian defect #250 was just one, initial (and obvious) performance
> problem. [Though, as I mentioned in a previous thread, if you're using a
> Xapian flint database, (look for .notmuch/xapian/iamflint), then you
> won't get the benefit of the Xapian fix until you rebuild your notmuch
> database from scratch with a current notmuch.]

I didn't know about this need to rebuild, but I tried that and didn't
have any more success sadly.

> Once you've verified that you've got the #250 fix functional, there
> could still be lots of performance bugs. And it would be time to start
> profiling.
>
> [...]

I'm pressed for time at the moment, but in a few weeks I might have
some time to investigate here...

-- 
    Oliver Charles / aCiD2