The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 9:57 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
In reply to: The notmuch mail client by Darkmere
Parent article: The notmuch mail client

Makes sense, you need a database for that many emails I suppose. Something like Akonadi I would say :D

Would certainly be an option for the notmuch mail client...

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 16:42 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (2 responses)

I think I've heard of this akonadi. That's the thing that isn't actually a
DB, but backends to one, right? Iirc, it's the cause of some ire in Debian
because the package depends on the mysql-server package, meaning any KDE
desktop user needs an installed and configured mysql server on their
machine.

Anyway, I think xapian is more fit-for-purpose for this problem than a
generic relational database.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 17:25 UTC (Wed) by wstephenson (guest, #14795) [Link] (1 responses)

That's just a packaging mistake then. What are these debian cowboys like? </joke>.

Contrary to what you've heard Akonadi doesn't require a configured mysql server running on the machine. It spawns a per-session instance of mysql running a custom config that is tweaked, minimal and secure. We started with mysql-embedded but after running into weird problems with it, went for the standalone process - it doesn't create significantly more overhead and we think we have the process management sorted.

You do still have to have an installed mysql though. Postgresql and sqlite support are being worked on, but we've run into a lot of problems with heavily multithreaded access to sqlite.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 25, 2009 23:12 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> we've run into a lot of problems with heavily multithreaded access to sqlite.

Try delegating writes to a dedicated thread (per db handle) and allowing only read access from other threads.