notmuch in Emacs very slow

[notmuch at bontempi.net]

Hello,

I would like to report my experience with notmuch (newbie here).

I absolutely love it. I would like very much to continue using it, but I am having a speed issue from inside Emacs.

I have installed notmuch 0.9, on OS X 10.6, using of course the chert database format. I am also using Emacs 24.0.90.1 on a quad-core Intel Core i7 (no SSD though).

I started doing 'notmuch new' on a Maildir folder with about 30000 messages (about one fourth of my archive).

At beginning notmuch was indexing about 200 msgs/sec. The more it indexed, the slower it became. After about 20000 msgs it slowed down to 70 msgs/sec. I am not sure if that is a behaviour due to Xapian.

Anyway, after it finished that first part, starting notmuch from inside emacs, it says:

"Welcome to notmuch. You have 34,366 messages."

Once I start browsing the inbox (34,208), Emacs displays the initial screenful, but the whole list takes quite a while to load, about 50 seconds. After that time, in the status bar I see "Top of 1.1M".

That happens every time I am browsing the inbox, in order to assign proper tags.

The real issue for me, though, is that scrolling down the list has a noticeable delay, enough to make it basically unusable.

Is there something I do not know that I should do to improve that speed (either from within Emacs, or in notmuch config file?

I would be very grateful for any advice or pointer on how to speed up the notmuch experience.

Thank you,

Sam