Question

1

Evolution slow when sending mail or switching between components

rated 0 times [ 1] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 4456 / 3 Years ago, wed, august 25, 2021, 2:32:32

I'm fighting with Evolution. Basically it's working fine -- but it is very slow to react in certain situations.

Helper questions

Could it be that changing away from Bonobo has to do with slowing-down?

There might be some trouble with the new engine and "asynchronous actions". What to do about it? Are there e.g. any configuration files?

I want to get the previous "working mood" back. How can I speed this thing up?

Different scenarios

when sending a mail, the composer window hangs there inactive for a couple of seconds, everything grayed out (the bigger the message/attachments, the longer it takes). Though there is a green check mark saying it's sent, I'm not sure a) why it's still blocking everything and b) whether I could simply close it without "breaking"/"losing" anything. In earlier versions, the composer window was closing pretty fast, and one could see the message being stored into the local "outbox" until it was sent, and one could immediately continue with the next task. I prefer that behaviour over the current, where I cannot do anything in the application until the window closes.

switching between modules. Coming from mail and switching to the address book takes a couple of seconds. Same for switching to the
calendar. I read about different "possible causes" and tried a few
things:

I only have 3 local address books, so no networking should be involved here. To make sure, I switched to offline mode and then tried
to access the address book. No noticeable difference.

I use 3 Google Calendars. Switching to offline mode made a minor difference, but so minor that it also could be "imagination" since one
might have expected this in this case

according to some reports, disabling the tasks should help. Well, it didn't in my case, as I don't use them regularly (just two local items stored here)

Maybe I should also mention that I'm using the KDE4 desktop (so no Unity or Gnome, though both is installed on the computer). And I did not have this issue before I updated to 12.04.

Answers

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gliroopy

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answered 3 Years ago tudatchful · Accepted Answer

How it magically solved

I had already given up on this, when it suddenly solved itself as side-effect of something else. The culprit once more (and I should already have expected that plus being used to it) seemed to be KDE4's plasma desktop: Having switched to LXDE about a week ago, a lot of things became excitingly snappy (including Firefox and Evolution), a bunch of other problems mysteriously disappeared^1,2, and I'm left almost happy with the situation -- except for the mail-window on sending a message, which still does not close immediately as in previous versions (but neither does take that long anymore), and the "switch" introduced a really minor new issue concerning my SuperKaramba status bar.

TL;DR:

Being a KDE user for almost 20 years now (yeah, that long, when in the 1990s KDE1 was introduced), I never wanted that plasma-desktop in the first place. So until I had to switch to a new machine last year, I was still using KUbuntu 8.04 as the latest LTE supporting KDE 3.5.*. I didn't want to setup my new machine with an outdated system either, which made me install Ubuntu 12.04 with KDE 4.x (including its plasma-desktop). If you browse my questions (not that many), you will see I immediately had a bunch of problems: plasma ate my memory³, Evolution got slow until being almost unusable if not closed and restarted twice a week (this question here), plus more things I didn't even dare asking^1,2. And the hard time getting rid of Nepomuk, Akonadi, and all the other unwanted services I didn't ask for!

So it's a somehow sad thing to break up with KDesktop after almost 20 years -- but it looks like it's time for a change. About 8 days into being a LXDE user, I must say I hardly miss a thing -- except for my SuperKaramba status bar which I configured and adjusted over the last 10 years to exactly fit my needs, and does not behave correctly anymore⁴.

So to stop my "rant": If you're using a lot of Gnome apps (especially Evolution), KDE4 is no good choice for your desktop environment. If you neither a friend of Unity (and all its background services, like in my case), consider using LXDE, XFCE or E17 (Enlightment) instead -- saves you a lot of headache! You still can use your favorite KDE apps if needed (for me this includes Okular, Gwenview, Qps, K3B, and KTerminal).

And if you didn't see me updating this question/answer within the next 3 months, you can safely assume this answer really solved it. Being cautions, I still will wait a little time before accepting it :)

Footnotes

¹ one other problem solved along: when editing a mail, and switching signatur or formatting via the corresponding drop-downs, I was no longer able to write in the editor window. After a few weeks I found a work-around (opening some menu, closing it again, and writing became possible), but it still was annoying

² using the desktop pager to switch to another desktop took up to a minute, while plasma was completely frozen. Until the switch finally fired, I could still work in apps open on the "old" desktop, though.

³ without showing up such in top, memstat, and other tools -- see Free RAM disappears - Memory leak?

⁴ see Superkaramba on LXDE ignores theme position and cannot handle lock/unlock?. I tried it with Screenlets (which claims to handle SuperKaramba themes), but all I get to see with it is the background image. It currently displays everything fine using superkaramba from plasma, but all actions are dead.