gpg is so slow :-( [LWN.net]

gpg is so slow :-(

Posted Jul 20, 2004 22:32 UTC (Tue) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor, graphical mail clients, and GPG

I use kmail from kde 3.3, so I don't have the problem our editor referred
to. However, I find gpg unbearably slow, so the lack of threading in
kmail leads to a long wait. In extreme cases, I have had kmail freeze for
ten minutes before finally coming and telling me somebody's key is
maginally trusted, while one minute is fairly normal. Midway through this
check I cannot (short of running kill) get control of my email program
back.

Now, you could say this is my fault for having too many keys on my
keyring. You'd be right, in a way. But IMO it should only penalise my
signature checks, it shouldn't interfere with just reading the mail. Since
I don't know if other programs support threading, I don't know if kmail
scores worse than others in this regard.

A while ago (two years?) there was an experimental branch of kmail with
threading support for gpg, but it never got incorporated into the
mainline. Ah well, I'm trying out gpg 1.9 now to see if it is any
faster...

Corrin

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gpg is so slow :-(

Posted Jul 21, 2004 6:45 UTC (Wed) by dd9jn (subscriber, #4459) [Link]

I guess you either have an ElGamal signing key in your keyring or a large keyring. gpg needs to rebuild its view of the Web of Trust at certain times and that may take quite long. You can avoid this by adding "no-auto-check-trustdb" to gpg.conf and run a nightly cron job of "gpg --batch --check-trustdb".