Is KMail excruciatingly slow by design?

[oshunluvr]

I'm a new user to Kmail, but more than 5 seconds to transition from one email to the next seems excessively slow. Anyone see it this way or is it a problem with my install?

[Snowhog]

Works fine here, but I do not have Nepomuk Semantic Desktop enabled, and therefore, it's email indexing isn't running either.

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, considering I'm having a regular nepomuk crash here I'm not either, LOL! But that might be the issue.

[SteveRiley]

Works fine for me, even with the Holy Trinity fully enabled.

oshun, you might try deleting and recreating the Akonadi resources that point to your mail and addressbook. Nepomuk crashes can sometimes be fixed by logging out of KDE, removing everything in ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/, and then logging back in.

[blobfish]

IMHO: KMail has never recovered from the kde3 to kde4 change. Finally about a year ago, I removed it and the required baggage. My machine runs so much better! I held on to it too long, but I had been using kmail since dapper and didn't want to change. I have been hoping for another mail client to grow out of Razor Qt.

[blackpaw]

Works fine for me, even with the Holy Trinity fully enabled.

oshun, you might try deleting and recreating the Akonadi resources that point to your mail and addressbook. Nepomuk crashes can sometimes be fixed by logging out of KDE, removing everything in ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/, and then logging back in.

That does often work.


I used to tag files and rate them, especially music. But its useless doing that really, inevitably you have to delete the nepomuk db to get a working system. The appaling instability of nepomuk renders its "features" pretty much useless. Amazing that its so unreliable after 4+ years of development.

[bweinel]

It can be a bit slow when you start kmail up from after a cold boot as its refreshing the database. Like Steve said if you start noticing random message read problems, its good idea to delete and recreate the Akonadi database.

There were some issues with the database indexs getting corrupted a few versions back and recreating the database fixed that all up as well.

cheers,
bill

[blackpaw]

To do it credit, nepomuk has been pretty good for file searchs for a while now. And there is improvement on the mail front. But its still making kmail look very bad on a regular basis.

[SteveRiley]

I wonder what it is I'm doing wrong, then. I just can't seem to break KMail or Nepomuk like the rest of you guys can. Should I be jealous?

<gdrvvf>

[blackpaw]

What sort of email accounts do you have and how large?

I have two imap, one disconnected one online for around 150,000 emails.

[kubicle]

You can disable just the email indexer in nepomuk settings (and keep the file indexing/tagging active) if nepomuk causes problems with (large amounts of) email.

I don't use Nepomuk so I don't know how reliable it is (KDE SC 4.11 will include some big changes in Nepomuk, though...including (promised) 30% speed increase), but kmail works fast and reliably on my end with a good number of IMAP accounts (IMAP works better IMO in kmail2 than it ever did on kmail1)...But I generally keep the IMAP accounts rather small, so I have no idea how it behaves with huge amounts of data.

[dmeyer]

I wonder what it is I'm doing wrong, then. I just can't seem to break KMail or Nepomuk like the rest of you guys can. Should I be jealous?

<gdrvvf>

Seconded. Seriously, since 4.9 Nepomuk, Kmail2 and Akonadi have been absolutely bulletproof. Also, Kmail2 is the fastest email client I've used for my massive set of emails. Maybe disconnected imap is the reason? I'm pretty sure kmail2 loads everything remotely unless you specify otherwise. Also, the features of kmail2 cannot be beat.

[blackpaw]

Agree, thats why I said nepomuk makes kmail look bad - kmail2 has been an outstanding imap client for me since 4.8 and the UI/features are 2nd to none. 90% of the problems people have are due to the feeder crashing or sucking up CPU, people see it as being a akonadi/kmail2 problem, but its really the feeder. Even when working the search is erratic.

I currently have indexing disabled as the feeder is crashing on me - and yes I have submitted a bug report.

OTOH, file indexing used to be equally flaky but now its pretty solid and useful. The dev is making steady progress on the feeder and I hope it will reach a similar level of reliabilty.


Sometimes I try out Ubuntu/Unity or Mint/Cinnamon but ironically its always kontact that brings me back. There's nothing to compare with it on the gnome side, or windows for me. Outlook is a match - and better in features, but I can't stand its UI.

[oshunluvr]

Ok, so I deleted (renamed really) ~/.local/share/akonadi ~/.config/akonadi and ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk

There was also a folder named ~/.kde/share/apps/akonadi_nepomuk_feeder but it was empty.

I had to re-enter my gmail settings, but otherwise no big deal So far. kmail seems a little snappier, but it's still slower than T-bird was. It seems to be about 2.5 seconds to load a large html message. Not too bad I suppose!

[dmeyer]

Ok, so I deleted (renamed really) ~/.local/share/akonadi ~/.config/akonadi and ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk

There was also a folder named ~/.kde/share/apps/akonadi_nepomuk_feeder but it was empty.

I had to re-enter my gmail settings, but otherwise no big deal So far. kmail seems a little snappier, but it's still slower than T-bird was. It seems to be about 2.5 seconds to load a large html message. Not too bad I suppose!

Enable disconnected imap> That should speed it up even more.