dreadfully slow kmail dragging the rest of the system down with it

[Neal Becker]

José Matos wrote:

> On Thursday 20 May 2010 01:02:59 Dave Stevens wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I have kmail 1.13.2 running with KDE 4.4.2. Recently (for about two
>> weeks) the performance has been really dreadful. It routinely drives the
>> load average on the system to about 1.4 or 1.5, takes up about 90% of a
>> cpu and generally makes the whole system only marginally useful. I can
>> easily use webmail to communicate but that's not why IO have Kmail
>> installed. I don't know what bits are responsible for this behavior and
>> don't know where to start looking. This seems (as I recall) to have
>> started with the KDE 4.4.0 release and has been rather sliding since
>> then. I use maildir format mailboxes and there has been no sudden
>> increase in the number of emails I get or send. If I let kmail alone for
>> a few hours it gets somewhat better. I suspect an indexing program, I
>> suppose akonadi? or nepomuk? I seem to have 8 instances of nepomuk
>> running. Where should I be looking for clues?
> 
> I noticed something similar before but I don't see this anymore. I am
> running 4.4.3 (although I am not sure this is the culprit for the good
> behaviour of kmail now).
> 
>> Dave
> 

Perhaps 'atop' can help you diagnose this?