Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Tuning For Evolution 2.24

Now that SLED 11 has been released and our server has arrived, I am in the process of prepping Evolution 2.24 for citywide deployment. The server has been built and configured, and today for the first time I started load testing. I am tuning for 300 concurrent, which Evo 2.6 on SLED 10 easily handles. With a user load of 21 people, I was getting the results below. Not good. Notification-daemon + dbus were chewing up tons of CPU.



With some tips in #evolution and poking around I made the following changes to the Evolution launch script:

/usr/bin/gconftool-2 --type Boolean --set /apps/evolution/eplugin/mail-notification/dbus-enabled False
/usr/bin/gconftool-2 --type Boolean --set /apps/evolution/eplugin/mail-notification/status-blink-icon False
/usr/bin/gconftool-2 --type Boolean --set /apps/evolution/eplugin/mail-notification/status-enabled False
/usr/bin/gconftool-2 --type list --list-type string --set /apps/evolution/eplugin/disabled "[org.gnome.evolution.sa_junk_plugin,org.gnome.evolution.mail_notification]"

This turns off all things blinking, dbus and calling the notification-daemon and now it's running much better. We already have a mail-notification popup applet running, and the alarms daemon will provide notification of meetings.

I will continue to tune over the coming weeks.

This is making me ponder how well newer versions of the GNOME desktop are going to scale on multi-user servers. Just a friendly reminder to people working on this code; keep those of us running hundreds of people in mind! :)

Update: Here is the same user load after the changes.

5 comments:

Colin Walters said...

Was it decided where the bug was, and did it get filed?

Dave Richards said...

colin: I'm not sure if this is a "bug". It's a scaling issue, but very possibly this would never happen with one person on their own computer. Maybe the blog will trigger some ideas as people are working in these areas of GNOME.

Anonymous said...

This is not only a scaling issue. Please also keep the "blink haters" out there in mind when deciding the defaults. ;)

Unknown said...

issue is that since beginning evolution was a piece of slow unusable crap.

I recommend u drop this bad idea and switch back to something else coz once u will get bigger mail archives it will be a pain in the *** coz of huge memory usage and cpu load.

Dave Richards said...

alexander: While I agree that sometimes Evolution is frustrating, it actually scales and runs well. These problems were related to dbus and notification daemons. We are required to connect to the Groupwise backend, and Evolution support of features is the most robust for native Linux applications.