Akonadi/nepomuk/virtuoso/strigi - was Re: Switching from Kmail2 to Thunderbird system on Oneiric 11.10

[O. Sinclair]

On 22/10/2011 11:35, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> Hi Valter,
>
> I've had similar experiences, on a fairly new system (Core i5, 4GB RAM) … I have a very large collection of my photographs on two external USB disks and every time I boot the computer akonadi scans the disks, even though I've told it to ignore removable media (shame because I was hoping I could use it for fast search of my photos by tag etc) … it usually takes about 4 hours before my system is useable. KMail was also very slow with my large gmail accounts. For a while I worked around this issue by only ever using 'sleep' and not shutdown… but when this became impractical I'm afraid to say I bought a Mac… fast search and indexing works beautifully on there, and although Apple Mail is no KMail, at least it works.
>
> Shame, because I think the philosophy behind akonaid is great, but it's been so long 'in the works' and still isn't reliable that my patience gave out.
>
> Mark
>
> On 22 Oct 2011, at 10:24, Valter Mura wrote:
>
>> 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 :)

I am refusing to give up but - I am not going to upgrade from 04 to 10. 
I did try KMail/Kontact2 but had to revert to v1 - and if the Kubuntu 
crew are clever enough to tell you "don't migrate but do this instead" 
something is clearly not right.

As for nepomuk/virtuoso - I now have to start my sessions by killing 
nepomukindexer that chews 25% of my cpu. Then wait patiently for 
virtuoso or strigi or whatever to again reindex the music files I have 
not even played or touched for a long time.

Something is clearly wrong in the long chain of indexing and searching 
and storage, be it Kubuntu or KDE. And try to find a webpage that 
explains to you how they fit together, how you look for and fix problems 
etc. If you do, please report it here as I had no such luck.

Sinclair