[Geary] Heavy disk writes

[Andrea Corbellini]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 6:59 PM, Vaibhav Kulkarni <netvaibhav at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

Since I started using Geary, I observed my laptop is occasionally doing high hard-disk activity.

I tried to dig down to find out the cause, and my suspicion that Geary could be the culprit might actually be true.

Enter iotop. I ran this hard-disk io monitoring tool as follows:

  sudo iotop -ao

(Which shows the activity as "a"ccumulated quantity, and "o"nly those processes that do some activity.)

I let this run on the terminal, got back to web-surfing using chromium, and sure enough, after few minutes, I again saw my laptop hard-disk indicator LED blinking pretty vigorously. When I checked back in the terminal running iotop, to my shock, I found "geary" doing around 100 M of hard-disk writes, not once, but 4 times, each with a different TID. The second highest process, apart from geary, wrote around 4 M. So clearly Geary is doing more writes than others by a fair margin.

So my questions are, is this what is causing my hard-disk to thrash? And is this normal for Geary?

I'm personally using Geary on a daily basis but have never seen this behavior.

However, Geary uses SQLite for storing mails, which is pretty hungry for I/O. Try vacuuming the database:

    sqlite3 ~/.local/share/geary/*/geary.db
    sqlite> vacuum;

This will both optimize the database and reduce its size.

I remember that once Liferea had a serious I/O problem and IIRC the team resolved it by auto-vacuuming the database periodically. Perhaps Geary should do the same.