Re: [Evolution] Evolution performance

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Mon, 2014-05-26 at 10:28 -0400, Reid Vail wrote:
> Hello group- 
> I have a performance question:
> My wife is running ubuntu 13.04 with Evolution 3.6.4 and it seems to
> me that it takes a long time to load; about 30 seconds from start to
> load
> She does have quite a lot of data.  Using the Evolution backup tool
> the compressed file is about 1gig.  Her machine is not stellar but
> should be sufficient.  She has a standard 7200-rpm drive and a AMD
> Athlon II X3 processor.  When I watch on the system monitor the CPU
> isn't working that hard, memory is fine, but the HD light is on solid
> until software and data load.
> Does this seem right?

Does she have lots of local mail?  [as in: downloaded from POP
accounts].

At some point Evolution changed from using [by default] MBox format for
local mail to Maildir - I do not recall what version that was - but that
can result in a big performance improvement as with MBox every folder is
one file [all messages in a single file].  If you can either upgrade or
just move her local accounts to Maildir that might help.

Another thing to try is to just purge the cache
[~/.cache/evolution/mail/ in current versions; I don't know what 3.6.x
used, there is a wiki pages about versions and their data directories].

A third thing is that while many applications use sqlite many did not
[or do not] vacuum their databases which results in slow performance and
file bloat.  These are the files that end in
".db" [find .local/share/evolution -name *.db]. See
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com/2011/11/all-those-sqlite-databases.html>  I do not believe this is a 
problem with current versions of evolution; but 3.6.x is *old*.


-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam whitemice org> GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA