SyncEvolution 1.3.99.4 released#
The focus of this development snapshot is enhanced performance of syncing. With EDS, contacts get added, updated or loaded with batch operations, which led to 4x runtime improvements when importing PBAP address book for the first time. Removing unnecessary work from any following PBAP sync resulted in a 6x improvement.
These improvements also benefit non-PBAP syncing and could in theory work with any SyncML peer. In practice, batching of items is currently limited to SyncEvolution as peer. The PBAP backend itself was rewritten such that data gets transferred from a phone in parallel to processing the already transferred data. The effect is that on a sufficiently fast system, a sync takes about the same time as downloading all contacts. To get the text-only part of the contacts even faster, PBAP syncing can be done such that it first syncs the text-only parts (without removing existing photos), then in a second round adds or modifies photos. The PIM Manager uses this incremental mode by default, in the command line it can be chose with the SYNCEVOLUTION_PBAP_SYNC env variable. The HTTP server became better at handling message resends when the server is slow with processing a message. The server is able to keep a sync session alive while loading the initial data set by sending acknowledgement replies before the client times out. Guido Günther provided some patches addressing problems when compiling SyncEvolution for Maemo. Details:
sync: less verbose output, shorter runtime For each incoming change, one INFO line with “received x[/out of y]” was printed, immediately followed by another line with total counts “added x, updated y, removed z”. For each outgoing change, a “sent x[/out of y]” was printed. In addition, these changes were forwarded to the D-Bus server where a “percent complete” was calculated and broadcasted to clients. All of that caused a very high overhead for every single change, even if the actual logging was off. The syncevo-dbus-server was constantly consuming CPU time during a sync when it should have been mostly idle. To avoid this overhead, the updated received/sent numbers that come from the Synthesis engine are now cached and only processed when done with a SyncML message or some other event happens (whatever happens first). To keep the implementation simple, the “added x, updated y, removed z” information is ignored completely and no longer appears in the output.
HTTP server: handle message resends If a client gave up waiting for the server’s response and resent its message while the server was still processing the message, syncing failed with “protocol error: already processing a message” raised by the syncevo-dbus-server because it wasn’t prepared to handle that situation. The right place to handle this is inside the syncevo-http-server, because it depends on the protocol (HTTP in this case) whether resending is valid or not. It handles that now by tracking the message that is currently in processing and matching it against each new message. If it matches, the new request replaces the obsolete one without sending the message again to syncevo-dbus-server. When syncevo-dbus-server replies to the old message, the reply is used to finish the newer request.
PBAP: incremental sync ((FDO #59551)[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59551]) Depending on the SYNCEVOLUTION_PBAP_SYNC env variable, syncing reads all properties as configured (“all”), excludes photos (“text”) or first text, then all (“incremental”). When excluding photos, only known properties get requested. This avoids issues with phones which reject the request when enabling properties via the bit flags. This also helps with “databaseFormat=^PHOTO”.
PIM: use incremental sync for PBAP by default ((FDO #59551)[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59551]) When doing a PBAP sync, PIM manager asks the D-Bus sync helper to set its SYNCEVOLUTION_PBAP_SYNC to “incremental”. If the env variable is already set, it does not get overwritten, which allows overriding this default. * PIM: set debug level in peer configs via env variable Typically the peer configs get created from scratch, in particular when testing with testpim.py. In that case the log level cannot be set in advance and doing it via the D-Bus API is also not supported. Therefore, for debugging, use SYNCEVOLUTION_LOGLEVEL=
to create peers with a specific log level. PIM: include pim-manager-api.txt in source distro ((FDO #62516)[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62516]) The text file must be listed explicitly to be included by “make dist”.
PIM: “full name” -> “fullname” fix in documentation ((FDO #62515)[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62515]) Make the documentation match the code. A single word without space makes more sense, so let’s go with what the code already used.
PIM: enhanced searching (search part of (FDO #64177)[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64177]) Search terms now also include ‘is/contains/begins-with/ends-with’ and they can be combined with ‘and’ and ‘or’, also recursively.
PIM: Pinyin sorting for zh languages (part of (FDO #64173)[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64173]) Full interleaving of Pinyin transliterations of Chinese names with Western names can be done by doing an explicit Pinyin transliteration as part of computing the sort keys. This is done using ICU’s Transliteration(“Han-Latin”), which we have to call directly because boost::locale does not expose that API. We hard-code this behavior for all “zh” languages (as identified by boost::locale), because by default, ICU would sort Pinyin separately from Western names when using the “pinyin” collation.
PIM: new return value for SyncPeer(), new SyncProgress signal ((FDO #63417)[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63417]) The SyncPeer() result is derived from the sync statistics. To have them available, the “sync done” signal must include the SyncReport. Start and end of a sync could already be detected; “modified” signals while a sync runs depends on a new signal inside the SyncContext when switching from one cycle to the next and at the end of the last one.
PIM: allow removal of data together with database removal (part of (FDO #64835)[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64835]) There is a difference in EDS between removing the database definition from the ESourceRegistry (which makes the data unaccessible via EDS) and removing the actual database. EDS itself only removes the definition and leaves the data around to be garbage-collected eventually. This is not what we want for the PIM Manager API; the API makes a stronger guarantee that data is really gone. Fixed by introducing a new mode flag for the deleteDatabase() method and deleting the directory of the source directly in the EDS backend, if requested by the caller. The syncevolution command line tool will use the default mode and thus keep the data around, while the PIM Manager forces the removal of data.
EDS: create new databases by cloning the builtin ones ((FDO #64176)[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64176]) Instead of hard-coding a specific “Backend Summary Setup” in SyncEvolution, copy the config of the system database. That way special flags (like the desired “Backend Summary Setup” for local address books) can be set on a system-wide basis and without having to modify or configure SyncEvolution. Because EDS has no APIs to clone an ESource or turn a .source file into a new ESource, SyncEvolution has to resort to manipulating and creating the keyfile directly.
EDS contacts: update PHOTO+GEO during slow sync, avoid rewriting PHOTO file If PHOTO and/or GEO were the only modified properties during a slow sync, the updated item was not written into local storage because they were marked as compare=”never” = “not relevant”. For PHOTO this was intentional in the sample config, with the rationale that local storages often don’t store the data exactly as requested. When that happens, comparing the data would lead to unnecessary writes. But EDS and probably all other local SyncEvolution storages (KDE, file) store the photo exactly as requested, so not considering changes had the undesirable effect of not always writing new photo data. For GEO, ignoring it was accidental.
EDS contacts: avoid unnecessary DB writes during slow sync Traditionally, contacts were modified shortly before writing into EDS to match with Evolution expectations (must have N, only one CELL TEL, VOICE flag must be set). During a slow sync, the engine compare the modified contacts with the unmodified, incoming one. This led to mismatches and/or merge operations which end up not changing anything in the DB because the only difference would be removed again before writing.
EDS contacts: read-ahead cache Performance is improved by requesting multiple contacts at once and overlapping reading with processing. On a fast system (SSD, CPU fast enough to not be the limiting factor), testpim.py’s testSync takes 8 seconds for a “match” sync where 1000 contacts get loaded and compared against the same set of contacts. Read-ahead with only 1 contact per query speeds that up to 6.7s due to overlapping IO and processing. Read-ahead with the default 50 contacts per query takes 5.5s. It does not get much faster with larger queries.
command line: execute –export and –print-items while the source is still reading Instead of reading all item IDs, then iterating over them, process each new ID as soon as it is available. With sources that support incremental reading (only the PBAP source at the moment) that provides output sooner and is a bit more memory efficient.
WebDAV: avoid segfault during collection lookup Avoid referencing pathProps->second when the set of paths that PROPFINDs returns is empty. Apparently this can happen in combination with Calypso.
engine: prevent timeouts in HTTP server mode HTTP SyncML clients give up after a certain timeout (SyncEvolution after RetryDuration = 5 minutes by default, Nokia e51 after 15 minutes) when the server fails to respond. This can happen with SyncEvolution as server when it uses a slow storage with many items, for example via WebDAV. In the case of slow session startup, multithreading is now used to run the storage initializing in parallel to sending regular “keep-alive” SyncML replies to the client. By default, these replies are sent every 2 minutes. This can be configured with another extensions of the SyncMLVersion property: SyncMLVersion = REQUESTMAXTIME=5m Other modes do not use multithreading by default, but it can be enabled by setting REQUESTMAXTIME explicitly. It can be disabled by setting the time to zero. The new feature depends on a libsynthesis with multithreading enabled and glib >= 2.32.0, which is necessary to make SyncEvolution itself thread-safe. With an older glib, multithreading is disabled, but can be enabled as a stop-gap measure by setting REQUESTMAXTIME explicitly.
Various testing and stability enhancements. SyncEvolution had to be made thread-safe for the HTTP timeout prevention.
Source, Installation, Further information#
Source code bundles for users are available in http://downloads.syncevolution.org/syncevolution/sources and the original source is [the git repositories](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/SyncEvolution/). i386, lpia and amd64 binaries for Debian-based distributions are available via the “unstable” syncevolution.org repository. Add the following entry to your /apt/source.list:
deb http://downloads.syncevolution.org/apt unstable main Then install “syncevolution-evolution”, “syncevolution-kde” and/or “syncevolution-activesync”. These binaries include the “sync-ui” GTK GUI and were compiled for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid), except for “syncevolution-activesync” which depends on libraries in Debian Squeeze, for example EDS 3.4. Older distributions like Debian 4.0 (Etch) can no longer be supported with precompiled binaries because of missing libraries, but the source still compiles when not enabling the GUI (the default). The same binaries are also available as .tar.gz and .rpm archives in [the download directories](http://downloads.syncevolution.org/syncevolution/). In contrast to 0.8.x archives, the 1.x .tar.gz archives have to be unpacked and the content must be moved to /usr, because several files would not be found otherwise. After installation, follow the [getting started](/documentation/getting-started) steps. More specific [HOWTOs](/wiki/howto) can be found in the Wiki.