After the encouraging message from Sebastian. I deleted the .notmuch/xapian dir and started again. It went off a good rate (300+ files/sec) and here was the final score Processed 494764 total files in 2h 54m 41s (47 files/sec.). Added 226817 new messages to the database. This is much faster than before. As I haven't changed the storage or the filesystem (ext4,data=ordered over encrypted aes-xts-plain), I just don't know what made the difference. My kernel is now 2.6.32-21-generic #32-Ubuntu and I had an older one the first try a month or so ago. Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> writes: [...] > Welcome to notmuch, and I'm so sorry to hear that your initial attempt > to use it was so frustrating. Thanks for the welcome! I was initially impressed by it but rather worried about relying on it after the database corruption. > I'm not aware of any bugs in notmuch that can result in a corrupt Xapian > database. In fact, this can't be a bug in notmuch alone (since Xapian is > detecting the corruption). There must at least be a bug in Xapian or > else some lower-level failure is occurring (disk full?) that Xapian > can't deal with. Disk full is quite likely. I'll try to avoid that in future. [...] > So there's some performance problem that you're having in addition to > the database corruption. Hopefully we can figure that out. What kernel > and filesystem are you using? Are you using an encrypted partition? Happy to say (though frustrating for you), this time it's much faster. Maybe because I had more disk free this time round so the Xapian database became less fragmented? (Speculation, no evidence.)