notmuch's idea of concurrency / failing an invocation

[micah anderson]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:20:00 +0100, Thomas Schwinge <thomas at schwinge.name> wrote:
> Stepping away from the current code base -- what is notmuch's original
> idea of concurrency?  That is, all of us probably know that one:
> 
>     A Xapian exception occurred opening database: Unable to get write
>       lock on /home/thomas/Mail-schwinge.name-thomas/.notmuch/xapian:
>       already locked
> 
> I recently saw that one while using the Emacs UI (that one tried to
> remove a unread tag or similar), and in parallel a delivery to the
> notmuch DB was going on.

Due to my harddisk in my laptop being slow (5400RPM), my notmuch
database growing, and perhaps some fragmentation somewhere, this has
become *incredibly* annoying for me. I am checking email every 30
minutes, and I'm nicing and ionicing the processes so I can use my
machine, but while those processes are running, I'm effectively locked
out of a good portion of my email. 

Usually, I switch to another task until my disk light has ceased being
solid, because the update time is too slow for me to wait. 

Now that folders are making it in, the two remaining features that are
driving me nuts with notmuch is this one and the
verification/decryption/encryption process (replying to an encrypted
message is 12 distinct steps for me, which is discouraging me from doing
that at all). 

I really don't want to complain, because I have no time to help in these
areas,  rather I'm interested  to know  if anyone  has any  pointers for
making this less annoying, and I'm  hoping that at some point I can free
up time to help. Perhaps I need to dump/restore my notmuch DB? Or index
less mail?

micah
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