On Sunday, January 16, 2011 01:26:01 am Jon Elson did opine:
> Well, this is quite off-topic, but I just went through HELL with my
> Thunderbird email client.
> It has been acting flaky for a while, with about 2-minute hangups every
> now and then. When it does this, the CPU utilization goes to 100% for
> the duration. Now, suddenly, these delays are 8 minutes long! This is
> with Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 on a 1.7 GHz pentium 4 just updated to 2 GB of
> memory.
>
> I tried to update to Thunderbird 3.1.1, and the delays with that are 67
> minutes long!
>
> I have a HUGE number of emails stored in many folders going back to
> 1997, and also have newsgroup folders for such as
> rec.crafts.metalworking. My newsgroup service has everything going back
> to 2003, so there are 600,000 message headers
> for the R.C.M. group alone. I think Thunderbird is constantly
> "indexing" this stuff for some reason, although I have tried to
> turn off EVERYTHING possible that I don't need.
>
> So, what do others use for email and newsgroups on Linux systems? I'd
> need something that could import the mail files
> from Thunderbird.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jon
That has got to be a 20+ gigabyte email corpus Jon. And its likely that
with only 2Gb of ram, its swapping like crazy. Like you, I have tried to
unload kmail's workload by using fetchmail to pull it in and buffer it for
procmail, which passes 99% of it through spamassassin, gets the report back
from SA and if 6 stars or more, sends it off to /dev/null. What passes the
SA gauntlet gets merged to /var/spool/mail/gene and kmail then pulls that
every 3 minutes and sorts it to the named local folders.
However, despite my own local corpus also being 20 some Gb, there are only
2 folders that I don't expire in 2 weeks to a month, and controlling the
sizes of the folders seems to control that index rebuild period quite well
here. The only time I notice any lag is immediately after a reboot and
kmail restart. 6 months ago, with an earlier version of kmail and earlier
version kernel, that could be as long as 65 minutes of laggy performance
after a reboot, but I believe that has largely been 'niced' out as I
haven't noted this lag on a restart in 6 weeks or so.
I suspect that some of that better behaviour can be attributed to my having
4Gb of ram and a slow, 2.1 Ghz Phenom quad core, but the huge majority of
that difference can be laid squarely on some huge diffs in the kernels
scheduler since 2.6.37-rc2 or so.
Right now, amanda is running and at least one of those 4 cores, sometimes 2
of them, are saturated by a gzip -best operation, and I am not feeling a
thing laggy as I type, the new features of the scheduler are a huge
improvement in the desktop feel.
So while you may want to just throw more iron at the problem, I suspect
that building your own fresh and shiny 2.6.37 kernel, and maybe another 2Gb
of dram in it to slow the swapping will seem to be a miracle. If that
doesn't help, I'll see if I can help you with the
fetchmail/procmail/spamassasin setup as unloading that job of doing the
fetching & filtering, by letting the background stuff handle it, can reduce
t-birds workload quite a bit too.
Even with 4Gb, at nearly 11 days uptime, I am showing as having 31 megs in
swap, but I was doing some hi res (1200 dpi) scanning & work with gimp last
night and that may have pushed it over the edge into swap.
Another thought is that it may be able to expire those boxes by sending the
older stuff to an archive you can still search, but t-bird doesn't index,
but I don't know that much about t-bird. I might be able to do that in
kmail, but the /home partition, at 29Gb, is darned near full now and I am
going to set /home up to 100Gb on the next install.
And no, I don't consider this 'off topic'.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
There is no royal road to geometry.
-- Euclid
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