Re: Weekly SoC report (Thunderbird backend)

["Pierre Östlund" <pierre ostlund gmail com>]

On 7/8/07, Sean Carlos <sean carlos gmail com> wrote:

If I understand correctly, the Google Desktop has taken the route of
using an extension to access and index Thunderbird Mail.

Yes, this is the case.

F.y.i, their implementation is unusable for many (all?) users:
Thunderbird ends up hogging up system resources - you need to disable
Google indexing if you have Thunderbird open.

Relevant threads:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Desktop-Linux/search?group=Google-Desktop-Linux&q=thunderbird&qt_g=Search+this+group

Titles include:

* Crazy Memory Usage
* Google Desktop + Thunderbird = Slow
* Thank you / Thunderbird slugishness

This is very bad. We should not have this problem with beagle though as I'm distributing the processing over time by pulling a batch of mails (or whatever) a given time unit, making sure we don't hog the system. Memory usage should not be affected much either as I'm using the internal databases (Mork databases) when marking if an email is indexed or not, which is very memory effective since the data set added is very small in size. Most of these settings will be editable from a GUI once I've finished writing the indexing part of the extension. I'm also adding "add a warning when loading the extension if the Google Desktop extension is loaded" to my to-do list. We should allow this, but warn the user that it's not ideal.

Quoting from one:

"Doing anything with Thunderbird, even after it's fully indexed, is
painfully slow.  Opening a message can push the processor to 100%.
Downloading new mail takes a very long time, and then the system chugs
for a couple of minutes after the downloads are done."

This has been my experience as well.

Hopefully we don't end up here and thanks for keeping me updated :-) AFAIK I'm supposed to upload my work to Google some time tomorrow for my mid-term evaluation, so there might be something to test out by then.

Thanks!

Pierre Östlund