[Evolution-users] Speeding up Evo?

[Milan Crha]

On Mon, 2025-09-22 at 19:12 +0200, Michael SHARP via evolution-users
wrote:
> My search terms are usually an obscure "single" word that I know is
> in the subject line. When I don't get result, then I try to restrict
> it with "Message contains". I not sure what the difference is between

	Hi,
the difference is huge. When searching in values you can see in the
message list (like Subject, Recipients, Sender, and so on), then the
search happens locally and thus quickly. The Message/Body contains
requires the whole message to be downloaded, to search in it. It's very
different from searching in the data already available (local summary).

> So I guess it's "Subject or addresses contain" by default, as those
> searches generally give a short list to locate it. I have tried to
> restrict the search to current folder.

Correct, "Subject or Addresses contain" is the default. I've been
asking what you have/had there, similarly for the "in" part. When you
changed these and searched for something, did it search significantly
quicker? It should.

> At the time I remember being able to search through 250k emails in
> maybe 5 seconds

It really depends what you search for and where. Like I mentioned
above, Message/Body contains requires the whole message to be
downloaded, while the search in Subject can be done with the local
data. Some accounts are solely local, having messages already
downloaded (like POP, or generally On This Computer account), then the
message content search is quicker, because no download is involved.

Search with the "Subject or Addresses contain" in a folder of 251868
messages takes here like a second and a bit. It just goes through the
locally saved summary of the messages in the folder and returns the
result. It's the simplest search, apart of searching in a Subject
itself only.

The status bar can contain more information about what it is doing,
like when the download of the message from the server is slow, then the
status bar shows something like "Retrieving message 123...", instead of
"Generating message list...".

	Bye,
	Milan