[Geary] Heavy disk writes

[Nelson, Jim]

Hmm ... I don't see anything like this with iotop.  Know that even if Geary is minimized and not receiving mail, it does periodically poll the server.  It does this for a couple of reasons: (a) to check that the connection is still alive (there are certain situations where a dropped connection is not detected at the socket layer) and (b) changes to IMAP message flags are not reported during IDLE, meaning that Geary has to periodically download them and compare them against what's in the database.

That said, neither of these activities should result in 100MB of disk writes.  Even the message flag changes only writes changes, which is generally pretty minimal.

So, a few questions:

* What service are you using?  Gmail, Yahoo, Dovecot, none of the above?

* How many messages are in your Inbox?  (Approx.)

* How many folders do you have?

I might need you to send a log at some point, but let's start here.

-- Jim

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Vaibhav Kulkarni <netvaibhav at gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 12:05 AM, Jim Nelson <jim at yorba.org> wrote:
Andrea's thinking corresponds to mine.  In your ~/.local/share/geary directory is a directory with your email address.  Inside there is a .db file.  How large is it?

It's 131 MB. This is after vacuuming using as per Andrea's suggestion. I didn't observe the size before vacuuming.


On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Andrea Corbellini <corbellini.andrea at gmail.com> wrote:
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 tried vacuuming the database using the above commands. I think the behavior still persists. In fact now I find the disk writes getting even larger.

What wonders me is that I'm not touching Geary at all. It is running in the background, as a minimized window. There's no email send or receive activity going on during this period too. Still I see this > 100 M disk writes from geary in iotop, and my laptop hard-disk indicator blinking continuously for 3-4 seconds every 5 minutes or so.

Regards,
Vaibhav