[Evolution] Poor performance on maildir?

[Ng Oon-Ee <ngoonee gmail com>]

Hi all,

I've actually been using Evo for the past couple of months with a
maildir served up by offlineimap from my gmail. The mailbox is about 2+
GB, so not too big. Many subfolders (about 40 I think all included, up
to three tiers), and some of them have a couple of thousand messages.

Anyway, throughout this time, whenever Evo was up and accessing the
maildir, I would notice lots of IO in my conky, and the system would
become jerky perhaps every 4-5 seconds, music playback would be fine
(its buffered) but if I was running a 3D app things would skip a bit
every 4-5 seconds.

I didn't think much about it previously as I only open evo when I want
to mail/read mail, and my unread mail notifications are on my conky in
any case, so I tend not to have it on when doing other stuff.

However, just yesterday due to some problems with my message copying
from other accounts I decided to serve up my maildir using dovecot, and
connect via evo's IMAP. Suddenly, the 4-5 seconds jerkiness just
disappeared. Now I don't even notice evo is working in the background,
despite the added overhead of another daemon running.

Anyway, that's been my experience with the maildir feature. Has anyone
else experienced this, or could it be specific to my setup? x86_64 on
Arch Linux, running Gnome (obviously), ext3/4 on all my disks. Kernel is
2.6.30, same issue in 2.6.29, stock configs without any IO
modifications.