performance problems with notmuch new

[Franz Fellner]

I also suffer from bad performance of notmuch new.
I used notmuch some years ago and notmuch new always felt instantanious.
Had to stop using it because internet was too slow to sync my mails :/
Now (with better internet and a completely new setup using mbsync) indexing one mail takes at least 10 seconds, sometimes even more.
It can go into minutes when I get lots of mail (~30...).
When I run it after a reboot I can have breakfast while notmuch starts up...
This is all on spinning rust. I thought of getting an SSD but not in the near future.

What I observe during that time: notmuch doesn't really need much CPU.
iotop shows constant read and write with extremely low rates, under 1MB/sec.
So I think it might be an issue in xapian?

If there is anything I can do to help debug this please tell me

Franz 

P.S.:
@David: Sorry for writing only to you.
GMail web interface only added you as recipient and not the list...

On Wed Apr 15 11:08:01 2020, Don Zickus <dzickus at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have noticed my 'notmuch new' command seems awfully slow, maybe 10-20
> emails / second on large batches.  It goes quick for the first few hundred
> (maybe close to 100/second), then quickly slows down to about 10/second
> after processing the first 500 or so.
> 
> I am guessing that isn't an expected behaviour.  So I am trying to figure
> out a good way to analyze and debug this?  This could be a problem with my
> fedora distro or laptop.  I just don't know where to look.
> 
> Tips for debugging this?
> 
> I ran the notmuch performance/time-test, but after 15 minutes of waiting for
> the initial notmuch new to finish, I gave up and aborted.
> 
> I am using 'glass' for my xapian storage if that helps.
> 
> Help?
> 
> Cheers,
> Don
> 
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> 
> 
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