Evolution : oh my god !

Vincent Trouilliez vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr
Mon May 9 00:23:36 UTC 2005


Jesus Christ, I still can't believe what happened ! :-/ :o(

I like Evolution, other than being very sluggish, I don't have anything
against it.

But as I was typing my previous post to this list, 5 minutes ago, all of
a sudden, keyboard delays started to appear... Evolution would take
literally 30 seconds to answer each and every keystroke !
Then I looked at my machine, and saw that the hard drive was working
like hell, really like hell. System was extremely slow to respond but I
eventually managed to start a terminal and type 'top'. 
I looked for processes hogging the CPU, but CPU was only idling, as it
should. However I saw that 'top' reported that the system memory was
fully used, and that swap was currently using ONE GIGABYTE !!!!!!!
Problem is that I have 768MB of RAM, and that the only program running
was Evolution. In these circumstances  RAM is normally 90% free and swap
is never touched.
At this point, the hard disk had gone crazy for a few minutes already,
and was still reading/writing whatever, at full blast.
I tried closing Evolution (again, took 30 seconds for the system to
respond), and instantly, everything went back to normal : hard drive
activity stopped, RAM usage reported only 150MB used and swap usage was
down to zero.

So it's hard not to incriminate Evolution ! :o(((

Evolution is nice, but since it's now a central part of Gnome, second
only to Nautilus, and that everything is built around it, it becomes a
critical part of the system, so you would think it would sustantial
development effort/time, to make it as stable/mature as possible... but
sadly it doesn't seem to go this way :o(
Then again, no big surprise, as the same goes for Nautilus as well :o(

Well, I will just relax and be patient as usual. Maybe in a few years,
as Linux and Gnome start ruling the world, the community will start to
seriously work on Nautilus and Evolution, to make them as fast and bug
free as they ought to be. If only I could be a billionaire, I would
employ 200 people to sort out Gnome/Evolution/Nautilus... :o)


--
Vince





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