Lieer writes to database continuously while syncing, which is bad on COW filesystems

[kode54]

I'm doing the initial sync of my 6GB Gmail account with roughly 512k messages, and it slows to an absolute crawl, all while spamming roughly 40MB/s worth of writes nonstop to the database.

It would be nice if this could be collected as an atomic operation.

As an alternative, the user could use a tmpfs storage for the maildir until the initial sync is done.

[sten0]

As an alternative, the user could use a tmpfs storage for the maildir until the initial sync is done.

I feel like this would need to be an opt-in feature, because the typical upper limit for a Google account is 15GB, the overhead of GNOME or KDE is about a GB, and if a user has a browser open then there go another couple of GB. Meanwhile the average amount of RAM in a new system is allegedly still 16GB this year (in late 2025).

Having worn out two top-tier SSDs, which is allegedly supposed to never happen, I agree that there is value in adapting software for a COW world.

[kode54]

I could also do what I did and shove the database on something not COW until the sync is complete. Maybe XFS or ext4. Not really your fault that I have 4.2GB of Gmail. Most of those messages I've kept are really tiny, actually.

Funny story, there's also a single message that has an empty message body, I think? It registers as "not email" according to notmuch new scanning the rest of my mail folder.

Edit: Never mind, the weird message seems to have vanished? The smallest message I have is a test message that I sent ages ago.

[laur89]

I could also do what I did and shove the database on something not COW until the sync is complete. Maybe XFS or ext4.

Or alternatively turn off CoW for your particular dir:

mkdir /path/to/mail
chattr +C /path/to/mail