KMail: Sluggish almost beyond belief

["Nicholas Bodley" <user=1375@nabble.blu.org>]

Fortunately, it's not my usual mail client. I'm dual-booting OpenSUSE 10.3, 
and have been trying out KMail for the past few months. POP3 fetch is 
dismally sluggish; I'd estimate maybe 5 seconds per message (I should time 
it). 

I also like to classify every incoming message as OK (green check mark) or 
spam (white curved arrow). Classifying is also dismally slow, taking about 
one second per message, and totally disabling the UI (more later) while 
doing so. 

The machine is reasonably modern, a refurb emachines T6532, Athlon 64 @2.2 
GHz (iirc, a "3500"), 1 GB RAM (shared with NVidia video), lots of HD 
space, most likely UltraATA-133. I also, afaik, don't have any CPU-hogging 
processes running when it's so sluggish. 

I rather like KMail, and am asking more out of curiosity than for any real 
need for help, so this is a "background", low-priority inquiry. 

IIrc, Opera e-mail in OpenSUSE is nice and snappy. 

I'm guessing one of two things: A configuration problem that slows normal 
functions to a crawl, or the KDE developers' use of a bloatware high-level 
language that in practice produces dismally inefficient executables (or 
misuse of X Window functions, by any chance?). 

More: I like to keep almost all incoming mail. (Some might consider that 
silly, and I won't argue...) Result is that KMail now has a few thousand 
messages to cope with, which might be the cause. 

I wouldn't be surprised if some kind soul confirms that KMail is sluggish, 
and also might receive some advice on other e-mail clients that are likely 
to work much better. 

=+= 

<chat> 
As to unresponsive UIs, I came across an interesting interview* with a 
developer (CK, just about sure; very distinctive name) who did Many Good 
Things for the kernel, but said farewell to helping with kernel 
development, iirc because he felt that senior Linux developers apparently 
didn't care much about UI response times and such. 
*in an online Australian (iirc!) journal (apc? I know APC makes UPses...) 

At least, Linux fonts and typography have improved tremendously in recent 
years! I can recall trying out a few very peculiar native X Win. 
applications that had fonts so ugly that they looked like something the 
family cat caught, but wouldn't bring in, because it was too ugly. 
</chat> 

Regards, 
-- 
Nicholas Bodley 
Waltham, Mass. 
Midnight hacker in 1960 
almost threescore and a dozen 


Using KMail on OpenSUSE Linux 


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and 
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is 
believed to be clean. 

_______________________________________________ 
Discuss mailing list 
[hidden email] 
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss