[Bug 927195] [NEW] akonadi related processes can make the KDE desktop unusable

[Abel Deuring]

Public bug reported:

I installed yesterday the 11.10 version of Kubuntu on a 2.5GHz Core2Duo
laptop with 4GB RAM. The install went without any problems, but after
I copied ca 200GB data (lots of plain text files -- developer machine --,
and a decent amount of PDF files, (Libre|Open)Office files and a smaller
amount of music and image files) to my home directory, the KDE desktop
becomes literally unusable maybe 20 or 30 seconds after starting a KDE
session.

When I logged in via ssh from another machine and invoked "top" before
starting the KDE session, it turned out that four or five akonadi
processes consumed between 500MB and over 1 GB each. Well, these are
the last values I was able to see: soon after, top stopped to refresh
its display; typing "q" (for a subsequent "sudo halt") had no effects.
OK, I did not wait for hours for a response from the SSH shell, but
gave up after two or three minutes and hit the power button, assuming
that the memory consumption exploded further and that there was no
point to wait for hours that something visible happens.

"top" did not display the full program names; it were
akonadi_nepomuk_whatever and akonadi_mail_something (not 100% sure about
the latter though).

This is not a new issue (I had similar problems with older kubuntu
versions, and it is telling that Google shows a few links "how to
disable nepomuk in akonadi" on the first result page for the search
term "akonadi nepomuk"), but ISTM that there is no Ubuntu bug for
this issue, so I'm filing this bug.

I think these resource hogs should be disabled by default. I see the
point to have these so-called "Semantic Desktop Ontologies" at hand --
but there is a risk that "ontology", defined in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology as "the philosophical study of
the nature of being, existence, or reality as such, as well as the
basic categories of being and their relations", may mean in practise
that a computer is too busy introspecting itself to serve the user
of the machine...

** Affects: akonadi (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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Title:
  akonadi related processes can make the KDE desktop unusable

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