Notmuch indexing takes too long

Notmuch indexing takes too long

[Ondrej Jombik]

I am trying to move from mairix to some better solution. mairix has been
working really well for me, but it had some limitations.

I decided to give a try to notmuch, but I has been suprised with
estimated indexing time:

     Processed 4157 of 822462 files (10h 3m 42s remaining).

At the beggining when there was 11 hours estimate I simply thought that
those numbers are wrong. But they are not. This is really going to take
that long. I could not believe that you all wait that long to index your
maildirs:)

Also if I understand correctly the concept, whenever I want to
regenerate database, I have to move old away and create new one,
correct? mairix worked that way that you run it and it updated its own
database. Is it possible with notmuch as well? I simply do not want to
wait 10+ hours for every database regeneration, thought I am willing to
wait that long for initial indexing.

My last question is related to notmuch and Alpine. Alpine is
a IMAP/Maildir e-mail client based on old PINE. I get used to that so
much that I cannot move away (to Mutt, for example). Is there anyone who
uses notmuch with Alpine and created some scripts and/or key-bindings?

Of course I am not using nano for editing. I use ViM for e-mail creation
and answering. So maybe notmuch-vim is probably better option, I do not
know.

Thank you for any possible valuable answers and please Cc me in the
answer as I am not in the list.

Thank you

Ondrej

--
Ondrej JOMBIK
Platon Technologies s.r.o., Hlavna 3, Sala SK-92701
+421 903 PLATON - info@platon.org - http://platon.org

My current location: Phoenix, Arizona
My current timezone: -0700 UTC (MST)
(updated automatically)

Re: Notmuch indexing takes too long

[Patrick Totzke]

Hi Ondrej,

Quoting Ondrej Jombik (2012-11-09 02:58:09)
> I am trying to move from mairix to some better solution. mairix has been
> working really well for me, but it had some limitations.
> 
> I decided to give a try to notmuch, but I has been suprised with
> estimated indexing time:
> 
>      Processed 4157 of 822462 files (10h 3m 42s remaining).
> 
> At the beggining when there was 11 hours estimate I simply thought that
> those numbers are wrong. But they are not. This is really going to take
> that long. I could not believe that you all wait that long to index your
> maildirs:)
> 
> Also if I understand correctly the concept, whenever I want to
> regenerate database, I have to move old away and create new one,
> correct? mairix worked that way that you run it and it updated its own
> database. Is it possible with notmuch as well? I simply do not want to
> wait 10+ hours for every database regeneration, thought I am willing to
> wait that long for initial indexing.

Notmuch does incremental idnex updates once the initial index is build.
The initial indexing takes a while, depending on the number of mails you have
but 10 *hours* seems a little off. For me its ~5mins on the hdd and <2 on a ssd.

> My last question is related to notmuch and Alpine. Alpine is
> a IMAP/Maildir e-mail client based on old PINE. I get used to that so
> much that I cannot move away (to Mutt, for example). Is there anyone who
> uses notmuch with Alpine and created some scripts and/or key-bindings?

You might want to have a look at notmuchfs: https://github.com/tsto/notmuchfs
Also, there are a few other MUAs based on notmuch:
Check out http://notmuchmail.org/frontends/

Have fun,
/p