Initial sync of the calendar takes a prohibitive amount of time

[Pat McGowan]

Mako running 116

Initial sync of default google calendar ran continuously for 90 mins before I terminated it
The ics file grew to 8MB

I can see two major things from the log:
- it syncs all past events (I would suggest starting with the current or previous month if necessary)
- it adds recurring events repeatedly (is the query using the wrong API and receiving events by timeframe rather than as raw event data?)

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79014

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

see related bug about memory usage by evolution-calendar-factory:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-datetime/+bug/1342123

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

We use syncevolution, which communicates with Google on the remote side and evolution-data-server on the local side to store events. There is no API in syncevolution to limit the scope of events retrieved. We need to look into modifying it to do so, and to optimize it's operational time as it's ridiculously slow (this in part is likely due to evolution-calendar-factory using a flat file to store the calendar events).

Renato has indicated there is a newer version of syncevolution which has recently been released that may improve the situation. The next step is to try this new version and see if it helps.

[Victor Tuson Palau (vtuson)]

Can we look at the new version so we can better evaluate the options to fix it

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

We were able to improve the situation by limiting how far in the past to sync for calendar events. This was a combination of a new version of syncevolution, and a patch to it and sync-monitor to introduce a "syncInterval" configuration setting (defaults to 90 days) specifiying how many days in the past to go back when syncing. For my caledar, it used to take 20 minutes for initial sync. Now it takes 33 seconds! Will need testing by others but this seems to help greatly.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

Add to critical per product team

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package sync-monitor - 0.1+15.04.20150127~rtm-0ubuntu1

---------------
sync-monitor (0.1+15.04.20150127~rtm-0ubuntu1) 14.09; urgency=low

  [ Ubuntu daily release ]
  * New rebuild forced

  [ Renato Araujo Oliveira Filho ]
  * Use the new "startDate" filter to limit the number of events
    retrieved on the first calendar sync. (LP: #1339016)
 -- Ubuntu daily release <email address hidden> Tue, 27 Jan 2015 13:43:48 +0000