Notmuch success: Xapian database corrupt

[Carl Worth]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2010 14:18:09 +0000, John Fremlin <john at fremlin.org> wrote:
> terminate called after throwing an instance of 'Xapian::DatabaseCorruptError'
> Aborted (core dumped)
> 
> Is there any way to recover the database? Notmuch search works well and
> it takes absolutely ages (one or two days) to add my mail to it; and I
> would suspect that it might happen again . . . I'm on Ubuntu lucid with
> an Intel SSD.

Hi John,

Welcome to notmuch, and I'm so sorry to hear that your initial attempt
to use it was so frustrating.

I'm not aware of any bugs in notmuch that can result in a corrupt Xapian
database. In fact, this can't be a bug in notmuch alone (since Xapian is
detecting the corruption). There must at least be a bug in Xapian or
else some lower-level failure is occurring (disk full?) that Xapian
can't deal with.

I've not yet encountered a corrupt Xapian database, so I'm afraid I
don't have any tips to help you with that.

But I'm also surprised to hear that it takes you days to incorporate
your mail into a notmuch database. I have over 600 thousand messages
myself, and it takes a few hours (maybe 4?) to incorporate all of these
messages, but not days, (also with an Intel SSD).

So there's some performance problem that you're having in addition to
the database corruption. Hopefully we can figure that out. What kernel
and filesystem are you using? Are you using an encrypted partition?

-Carl
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