Hello On Tue, 10 Jun 2014, Eric Gillespie <epg@pretzelnet.org> wrote: > I'm a long-time nmh user, and I heard notmuch was supposed to > handle mh folders, so I gave it a shot. > > It's crazy slow. The first 'notmuch new' took 4 hours, but maybe > that's expected. However, every 'notmuch new' takes 4 - 10 > hours. The only time it completes faster is if I immediately > re-run it without incorporating new mail. In that case, it > completes in 0.8s - 38s, which is quite reasonable for my mail. > > I have 18.5 GB, 1,058,370 messages in 315 directories. > > From the messages it prints, apparently any directory that > changes (receives a new message) has to have all its files > indexed from scratch. What?! This is definitely not expected behaviour and doesn't happen under maildir. I would not expect it to happen under mh format but I am not familiar with that format. > # re-index after some new mail (< 1000; not 704083!) > Processed 704083 total files in 11h 7m 48s (17 files/sec.). > Added 701791 new messages to the database. Removed 701332 messages. Detected 2136 file renames. > > # re-index again, no new mail > Processed 60 total files in 40s (1 files/sec.). > No new mail. > > # incorporate 1 new message > Processed 9181 total files in 7m 54s (19 files/sec.). > Added 9071 new messages to the database. Removed 9071 messages. Detected 12 file renames. > > # incorporate 1 new message > Processed 111 total files in almost no time. > Added 1 new message to the database. Detected 12 file renames. > > # incorporate 1 new message > Processed 757 total files in 44s (17 files/sec.). > Added 645 new messages to the database. Removed 645 messages. Detected 14 file renames. Is anything else accessing modifying or doing anything to the MH hierarchy? Some things (eg http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/MH) indicate that some tools do manipulate the hierarchy (eg sortm renames things). if you run notmuch new as notmuch new --verbose --debug it might spit out some more useful information as to what notmuch is doing (*do* check that nothing it says is sensitive before posting though!) Another thing you could try is notmuch search --output=messages folder:somefolder before and after adding a message to somefolder (*) and seeing if that shows significant changes. (Note message ids do say a lot about who your correspondents are so you probably don't want to post the outputs to the list.) Best wishes Mark (*) the syntax for folder based searches changed recently so it may depend which version of notmuch you are running: i didn't see it mentioned in your email.