Switching from Kmail2 to Thunderbird system on Oneiric 11.10

[Valter Mura]

Hi All,

with regret, I can say I have tried everything for my poor system, but 
it cannot afford such a heavy workload.

My System (very old with some updates): Pentium IV 2.8 Ghz / Ram: 1 GB / 
Video Card: ATI 512 MB

History: I was coming from Natty 11.04 and Kmail-1. Everything was going 
smooth. Not so fast, obviously. but I could also keep enabled the 
desktop effects without problems. Swap (3 GB in total), when necessary, 
increased up to 4/5% on total (I used to keep open Kmail, Amarok, rekonq 
or FF, Lokalize at the same time). RAM on startup at abt 45/50%

My mail: 4 accounts (POP3) with a total of abt 40,000 mails (I deleted 
the unneeded ones)

My system after the update started the migration to the new Kmail 
system: it failed, but I succeeded to run it manually.
It started the migration and the SYNCHRONIZATION. From this moment on, 
my system has been poorly overloaded, with no way to stop this hell (for 
me) "machine" which is Akonadi and its agents: (my poor and old) CPU the 
most of time at 100% of load, not for few hours but for DAYS, swap 
increased up to 50% (!); RAM always at 80/90%; activities and actions 
extremely slowed down.

Ok, I've been wrong in something. So I deleted my accounts, setup them 
again, trying to "clean" the system (luckily, mail servers I use don't 
delete mail by default).
Now I tried to setup Gmail as Imap: worst than ever. Kmail couldn't 
afford folders/labels of this size (thousands of mails). I deleted the 
Imap account and re-setup the POP3 one. No way to solve the huge 
workload. And what about opening a mail folder? No way to do that, 
unless after few hours.

Akonadi and mysql daemon seemed to be allied against my system.

As I cannot stay without my (previous) good system, because I 
collaborate with various localization communities (specifically, KDE, 
Kubuntu, LibreOffice, OmegaT, amongst them), I decided to DELETE my 
accounts and ALL Akonadi resources in the system and to quickly setup 
Thunderbird: Imap for Gmail (more than 100,000 mails in the server) and 
POP3 for another account (with 8,000 mails in the server).

It obviously took some time to do that (but no more than half an hour 
for download and synchronization), but everything went smooth (even if 
TB integration in KDE is poor).

My system now: at startup RAM 50% / Swap 10% / CPU normal work 
(presently fans resting and reading a book... :)

I had to "kill" manually this morning some akonadi activity and, again, 
mysqld, but everything seems to go better now.

So, my wish is: not all systems are new and fast. In many countries 
maybe many people still use old systems. In net-books this kind of 
behavior is deprecated: nobody will use KDE 4.7.2 with Kmail2 and Akonadi.

I'm obviously not changing system, because I really like KDE and 
Kubuntu, I WANT to use them and I managed to tune them for my needs even 
if with some loss).

But I always wonder what would happen if an average user (as I am), the 
day after upgrade, found a situation as described above. He/she would 
change immediately system or call ?@!$&?@ the friend who suggested and 
installed it.

I'm waiting for good news in this spaces...

In the meanwhile, sorry for the long post (and my bad English) and enjoy 
the music :)

http://youtu.be/sF66R_cdqsQ

Ciao
-- 
Valter
*Open Source is better!*
KDE: www.kde.org
Kubuntu: www.kubuntu.org
LibreOffice: www.libreoffice.org