gauteh
Lieer writes to database continuously while syncing, which is bad on COW filesystems
I'm doing the initial sync of my 6GB Gmail account with roughly 512k messages, and it slows to an absolute crawl, all while spamming roughly 40MB/s worth of writes nonstop to the database.
It would be nice if this could be collected as an atomic operation.
As an alternative, the user could use a tmpfs storage for the maildir until the initial sync is done.
As an alternative, the user could use a tmpfs storage for the maildir until the initial sync is done.
I feel like this would need to be an opt-in feature, because the typical upper limit for a Google account is 15GB, the overhead of GNOME or KDE is about a GB, and if a user has a browser open then there go another couple of GB. Meanwhile the average amount of RAM in a new system is allegedly still 16GB this year (in late 2025).
Having worn out two top-tier SSDs, which is allegedly supposed to never happen, I agree that there is value in adapting software for a COW world.
I could also do what I did and shove the database on something not COW until the sync is complete. Maybe XFS or ext4. Not really your fault that I have 4.2GB of Gmail. Most of those messages I've kept are really tiny, actually.
Funny story, there's also a single message that has an empty message body, I think? It registers as "not email" according to notmuch new scanning the rest of my mail folder.
Edit: Never mind, the weird message seems to have vanished? The smallest message I have is a test message that I sent ages ago.