…at least partially. With the introduction of the Data Management Service we got a very powerful way to put your data into Nepomuk: storeResources (thank you Vishesh). I will not go into the details here but the important fact is that the file indexer, the Akonadi indexer, the TV namer, the movie integration, and maybe some more rely on this method.

Thus, it is obvious that improving its performance means improving the performance of the overall system in general.

Now like I said it is a very powerful method. Sadly this results in very complex code that is not easy to wrap your head around. So optimizing it is not trivial. I tried anyway and tackled one of the main parts of it: the resource identification. After playing around a little, trying different ways to break up the main query I got to a point where I am satisfied. And here is why:

Finally some nice bar graphs! So what does this tell us? Well, the most important bit is that with my patch we save roughly 3 hours when indexing the 196692 Akonadi items I used for testing. But maybe more importantly: if the identification is faster the whole indexing is smoother and eats less CPU since it is throttled and, thus, has shorter phases of high CPU usage.

I took the Akonadi indexing as an example since the difference here is impressive. The file indexing is also slightly improved but by far not as significant as the Akonadi indexing. I suppose this is due to the very simply identification that is required during file indexing (some very basic nco:Contact merging is all that is required most of the time).

So, this is what you will get with KDE 4.8.2. One of several going away presents…