performance problems with notmuch new

[David Bremner]

Franz Fellner <alpine.art.de at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

I do have at least one spinning rust configuration with about 300k
messages, and notmuch new is still fast there.

> 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?
>

Just in case one of the xapian experts can suggest some kind of test for
why you might be seeing this behaviour, I've included the xapian list in
CC.

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

What kind of filesystem do you have on your spinning rust?

d