Comments on: KMail as components, Akonadi Mail Reader

By: Akonadi: It’s all Sausage « Steveire’s Blog

Akonadi: It’s all Sausage « Steveire’s Blog — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:00:25 +0000

[...] and modify it. That is a design feature which makes it possible to access your emails in Mailody, KMail and plasma, and have it all in sync. Always. By using Akonadi, KJots notes can be synced between [...]

By: Alexander van Loon

Alexander van Loon — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 11:23:59 +0000

@anon
In my case it was just other people voicing concerns about Akonadi’s resource consumption, which made me worried as well. Those others are not just Karl here, but for example here – http://randomtechoutburst.blogspot.com/2009/07/kde-43-more-ranting-review-comment.html – as well. But thanks to ervin’s explanation I’m convinced now that there is no need to worry.

By: kedadi

kedadi — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:28:19 +0000

@ervin
“And for the tooltip, weeell I’m not exactly gifted to make it pretty, you’ll have to find someone willing to make a mockup and we’ll see what could be implemented.”

Dolphin has a beautiful tooltip which I think can be used.

One more thing, is it possible to make all Qt tooltips look the same (like the one in dolphin), maybe from the Oxygen style?

By: anon

anon — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:49:09 +0000

“Could you please explain in more detail how it’s possible that Akonadi could possibly perform better and consume less resources than KMail regardless of it’s requirement of a database?”

I’d turn this on its head and ask “why wouldn’t it?” – databases pretty much exist in order to provide fast read/ write access to large volumes of data without having to cache all (or even a fraction) of that data in memory. Where does this stigma about database resource consumption come from?

By: Stefan Majewsky

Stefan Majewsky — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:59:34 +0000

@Karl: Why do you think that Akonadi creates a vendor lock-in for you? I think I heared of someone working on Akonadi integration for Evolution. Once Akonadi gains some traction and becomes widely used in KDE, I’m quite sure that more mail programs will adopt Akonadi in some way.

By: ervin

ervin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:46:57 +0000

@Alexander
Well, that mainly comes from the fact that KMail to cover search and archiving needs of your mails had to do the indexing and retrieval all by itself. We effectively had a kind of KMail ad hoc database system built in… so at one point you have to realize that people who actually work on database servers are better than you at this game. So instead of an ad hoc, inefficient, resource consuming KMail database, we’re using a real database system which performs much better and uses less memory for retrievals (for instance).

@Karl
Regarding memory consumption, I’m really surprised by your claims as I’m definitely not experiencing the same thing here. I can’t tell for nepomuk, but for akonadi the consumption would be more around the hundred of megabytes for me (and keep in mind I’m talking about a debugfull build with quite a lot of different services loaded in there, a release build with only POP3 for instance would consume much less). I think you should probably revise the way you’re making memory measurements, it’s definitely not a trivial task and one can be easily misled there. Lubos Lunak has very good posts on the topic.
Regarding the data locking, that’s completely wrong. It is not the case, if you download your mail via POP3 for instance, all your mail will be stored on disk in maildir format as usual, and it’ll get indexed. You should really see Akonadi as a cache for the data for us to make more efficient operations, not as the primary data store (which still is your filesystem, or your IMAP server, etc.).

If you want more information on the topic, there’s a very good Akonadi FAQ (the second point is particularly relevant to this discussion):
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Akonadi_FAQ

By: Karl Günter Wünsch

Karl Günter Wünsch — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:09:48 +0000

@ervin,
thanks for your take on the plans. So I will switch, as I have no need nor the wish to run such a processing and heavy application as akonadi – which would effectively lock my data into a database format with which no other application would be able to work with!
For example I have no need for IMAP support at all (I simply don’t leave email on a centralized server) nor any of the other heavy weight features!
My desktop applications must be able support my main tasks without taking too much resources from the machine – and akonadi with its database requirement takes way too much resources to be considered worth the effort! Btw. Nepomuk is excluded here as well, same reason – unfortunately another database lock down of data which must be shareable with windows and especially non-KDE applications!
To give you a perspective: When using akonadi and nepomuk on my machine half of it’s 4Gb of memory are taken up by the desktop environment – which immediately results in paging requests as soon as I start working with the large images and virtual machines I need to get my main tasks (editing raw DSLR images) finished.

By: Alexander van Loon

Alexander van Loon — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:03:47 +0000

I shared my worries about Akonadi’s performance with Karl, so I’m delighted to read that it will probably perform better. However, I wonder how that is possible? AFAIK Akonadi uses a MySQL database, and KMail does not at this moment. Could you please explain in more detail how it’s possible that Akonadi could possibly perform better and consume less resources than KMail regardless of it’s requirement of a database?

By: ervin

ervin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:52:32 +0000

@Karl
Well, as I said I’m not KMail’s maintainer so I could be wrong. But AFAIK there’s no plan to keep a “non-Akonadi KMail” once the Akonadi port of KMail is considered stable.

As for your refusal to run Akonadi, well I’m not the one to tell you what to run or not, but honestly it’s very likely that the Akonadi port of KMail will actually be lighter overall than the old one IMO (for an equivalent feature set, since the Akonadi one will, optionally, be able to do much more). Talking about the bit I know best, the IMAP support alone is faster (and I mean *way* faster) and more efficient than the one of the old KMail…

By: ervin

ervin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:45:23 +0000

@Luis:
1) AFAIK KAddressBook is pretty much done, and KOrganizer is worked on as I’m typing. But obviously my overview is not as good as KMail as I’m almost exclusively focusing on this one right now.
2) The one in 4.3 is a bit lacking compared to what we have in trunk right now. As I said earlier it’s not to be used in production, it’s really just to give you a taste of it. For the one in trunk we fix issues as we find them, but it seems reliable right now (at least on the servers I test with).

And for the tooltip, weeell I’m not exactly gifted to make it pretty, you’ll have to find someone willing to make a mockup and we’ll see what could be implemented.