Re: [Evolution] evolution and large mails

[guenther <guenther rudersport de>]

On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 17:47 -0400, Igor A. Nesterov wrote:
> Today I have received rather big mail. It was of 80,000 text lines,
> which gives us about 6MB, but other than that it was pure ASCII text.
> It's automatically generated message with some sort of alarms, so
> sometimes it happens. This message has practically killed Evolution and
> in fact the whole desktop. Evolution generated so much disk activity
> that any type of work on my desktop was impossible. I have been left
> without email during critical work time, and I had to spent more than
> 1.5 hours trying to figure out what happened to my desktop. I only got
> back to normal when I manually edited my incoming mailbox on IMAP
> server, and found and removed corresponding cache file under .evolution
> hierarchy on my desktop.

There are known issues regarding GtkHTML (the part of Evo displaying the
mails) and rendering large files.

I reproduced this previously with even larger test cases including lots
of stuff like email addresses (adding to the load for rendering) -- with
the result of Evo using up a lot of memory and CPU cycles for rendering.
However, this never affected any other parts of the Desktop for me,
other than low resources being left for them. Also, there has been no
heavy disk-activity for me.


> I am using
> evolution-2.6.0-1
> on
> 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 #1 Tue Mar 14 15:48:33 EST 2006 i686 athlon i386
> GNU/Linux
>
> running in VMware Workstation 4.5.2

Well, I guess that would be why. This sure limits the resources for your
GNOME Desktop and likely is the reason the for the heavy disk-activity
you noticed.

Both low physical memory resources and limited memory due to virtual
machines running in parallel will lead to swapping in a case like this.


> I am stubborn enough to continue with Evolution for a while trying to
> figure out how it can suite my needs both at work and at home. But I
> tend to agree with some people on this list this software is still far
> far from completion. Those nice looking revision numbers 2.4, 2.6, etc.
> cannot hide a fact that Evolution is really a beta.

Thanks for your sophisticated opinion, I guess...

...guenther


-- 
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0  ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}