performance problems with notmuch new

[Kim Minh Kaplan]

Franz Fellner 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.
>
> 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?

Hello,

I had a similar performance issue working with a very large email set
(in the million count). Amongst those, I have crons that run about every
minute and email back a report, mostly identical every time with some
thousands words.

Apparently indexing many times mostly identical emails triggers a
pathological behaviour. Moving these email out of my mail directories
brought back acceptable performances. We are speaking in the 10,000 to
100,000 files here.

Kim Minh.


> 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...