In case anyone's interested here is what I have found: My problem started in the first place due to a few runaway processes on a server (the mail machine also). The saturated CPUs resulted in very slow response and NFS timeouts. The issue is how this is handled by a multi-threaded volution. In this case it created a corrupted downloaded message.
I seems to me that when, for whatever reason, Evolution has trouble getting a response, it easily leads to either race conditions or deadlocks. I can't prove it, but the symptoms are there. It has happened to me many times. Usually I get a deadlock and have to kill the process - sometimes remotely. This time I got a race condition while reading/writing my Inbox file. It resulted in a single email repeated with over 3 million lines - a 180 MB message. When I cat-ed out the good parts before and after the corrupted message - I was able to recover all the mail I had lost in the Inbox. (There was nothing wrong with the original message on the email server which I had accessed many times). It took a long time for me to figure out what was wrong, since whenever I brought up Evolution, it crashed immediately while trying to read its folders. My advice for others in this situation - copy all the email files to somewhere else and add them back to .evolution/mail/local one or several at a time until you find the bad one. The developers might want to validate downloaded message formats to prevent this. Also they might want to make thread synchronization more robust to prevent these race/deadlocks. Often, after I add/update a Contact in my LDAP server through Evolution, that thread locks up/dies while the email editor seems to continue on its merry way as if nothing has happened. I have to kill the program to repair my LDAP connection. thanks, - Brian L Scipioni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 17:25 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > > Anyone know how to validate/reset the .evolution tree without > trashing > > it? > > I'd also like to know ... > -- Brian L Scipioni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Evolution-list mailing list Evolution-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
