Re: [Evolution] Evolution doing a lot of network traffic to/from Exchange

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Wed, 2022-10-12 at 13:00 -0400, Paul Smith wrote:
> Every so often I notice that there is a huge amount of network
> traffic to/from my system, it can last for quite a while (hour+)

        Hi,
most of the operations run on the Evolution side (related to mail) can
be seen in the status bar or when the "stop everything" button on the
far right of the Mail view's toolbar is enabled/sensitive. It doesn't
catch everything, but many operations it does.

> I have "Check for new messages" set to 5 min.

Depending where you connect to, when you've enabled "Listen for server
change notifications" and the Exchange server supports it, you do not
need that often checking. Nonetheless, the check should be relatively
small chunk of data, as the code asks "what did change since the last
time I asked" (the "last time I asked" is a sync tag, which can get
quite long over time) and the server returns what changed, if anything.
That's done for each folder.

> Could it be something with the GAL?

As Tim said, it depends how you've setup it. If you use offline GAL
(mail account Properties->Receiving Options tab), then the evolution-
addressbook-factory process checks for the GAL changes and updates its
local copy if needed.

When talking about GAL, open its Properties in the Contacts view. There
is an option to download contact photos. Maybe turn it off. If your GAL
is large, it can take a long time to get (or to fail to get) the photo
for every user in it.

> Is there any way to figure out what is going on here?

You can kill the flatpak evolution (with all its background processes -
there should not be any /app/ in `ps ax | grep evolution`) and then run
it from a terminal as:

   $ EWS_DEBUG=2 flatpak run org.gnome.Evolution

It'll show what the evolution-ews is doing and what the server is
returning. You won't see which process does it, all of them will be
mixed together, but you can at least see the operations it's issuing
towards the server. That may give a clue.

        Bye,
        Milan