Re: [Evolution] Evo Hang on Network Problems

[Brad Warkentin <brad warkentin rogers com>]

 Dan McGinn-Combs wrote:

> Sheesh... I don't want to start a round of "no it's not!", but I've
> noticed a couple of times that if I experience even a slight hiccup in
> the network, Evolution (1.45 on Gentoo 1.4-ish) croaks. I'm running in
> IMAP against a Microsoft Exchange 2000 server and often connect on the
> network directly and also over an obviously rickety PPTP VPN.

I certainly see it as well. Usually can resolve via initiating a
send/receive and cancelling it right away. After doing this, 9.something
times out of 10 it starts receiving mail again. 

Most times if I look at the logs I can tie the problem start to a issue
on the server side of things as my isp's mail servers have issues. Still
I run always on/always connected and typically have Evolution up 30-45
days between logging out of my account so I am a satisfied camper.

> I also note that if I use SpamAssassin as a filtering tool
> (spamassassin -e) to identify and remove spam, it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r
> to cycle through new messages and remove them to the spam folder.
> Would working from a file-based messaging database resolve this issue
> as well?

A couple of things help can help.Run spamd (cuts down the invoke time)
rather than spamassassin. I found running as me rather than root was
slightly faster (not sure why). If you have the ram, cranking up the
number of child processes helps. I run it with:

SPAMDOPTIONS="-d -c -a -m5 -H -u bj -x"
# -a        - use auto whitelists
# -c        - create user.prefs if does not exist
# -d        - daemonize
# -m5       - max number child processes
# -H        - define HOME directory behaviour
# -u bj     - run as user bj
# -x        - allow per user config files

Another, perhaps obvious, suggestion is to filter off all the known good
email first (your whitelist stuff, your closed mailing lists, etc) so
spamassassin has to process fewer emails. Depending on your patterns of
receiving email, checking your inbox more frequently so you don't have a
large backlog to process can help (takes the same amount of total time
but you don't see a big pause as it downloads a huge block of email).

How long is spamassassin taking per email (you can see this in
/var/log/maillog) ? I am on a slow box (500 MHz Celeron) and it takes
under 2 seconds/email for the majority of the spam it identifies.

cheers,
brad