Evolution Problems

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I have used evolution for email for a very long time and never been tempted to try another email client until recently. I’m not sure if the problems are related to evolution, my hardware, or other gnome related things. Early last year I built a new system with the latest hardware and did a fresh install of fedora 33. I noticed problems with evolution related to my screen going blank (dark) every time I switched from say firefox back to evolution. It may have happened from other apps back to evolution but that is the most common usage example of the way I use it. The screen could stay dark for several minutes or a few seconds. It could also go dark and stay for a bit and then come back on an then go into an oscillation between dark and light for several minutes. If lucky I could click the mouse on the firefox window and the oscillation would stop. That is the first example of things not behaving normally. I did a system upgrade using dnf to F34 last summer and things remained the same. In February this year I did another system upgrade to F35 using dnf. That brought along another set of symptoms. The screen going dark still happens but it only remains that way for a few seconds now. However it’s still a mystery as to how to get it to stop. It just does after a period of time. The new symptoms are using evolution. At times I can’t open an email because the at the bottom of the evolution screen I have messages "Storing changes in folder “On this Computer: Inbox” or “Saving user interface state” or “Generating message list”. These can occur individually or I can have a series of them across the bottom bar of evolution. Sometimes they take up to 5 minutes to clear before I can open another email.

Not a good situation!!

My hardware:
Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX X570-E Gaming
Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X running at 3.5 GHZ
Memory: 2 16GB GSkill F4-3600C16-16GTZNC at 3600Mhz
System Drive: Phison Electronics Corporation Force MP600 NVME 1 TB solid state drive
Internet: I211 Gigabit Network Connection 1000MB connection
VGA: NVidia GeForce GTX 1650 Running the 510 nvidia driver
Monitor: Samsung Electric Corp 31 inch resolution 3840x1260

This is running F35 Workstation. I thought it had improved a couple of kernel releases ago but under the current kernel 5.18.5-100.fc35.x86_64 the problems is as bad as I have seen.

Any help appreciated… Don’t know if anyone else has experienced this type behavior as I haven’t seen it mentioned.

Thanks, Edward

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sounds crazy, what you mean with “going blank”? the display is lost your Video Signal and get blank or only the application on your desktop?

should evolution start the problem, you had backup your user profile an try to configure a clean mail inbox?

or try to switch between wayland and xorg for any possible positive effects?

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This might be a good line of enquiry. I remember trying Evolution on Wayland briefly some time ago and it causing some serious problem or other (don’t remember the details as it was only a brief assessment & I quickly abandoned Evolution). If you’re using a wayland session, test switching to X11 (or vice versa).

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I seem to remember that since Fedora 34, the Wayland protocol is standard and since then, I’ve been using it. Unlike Evolution, which has been with me for over 20 years, I have not experienced such behavior. But it is worth a try. :upside_down_face:

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Could be a bum steer, my experiment was quite brief. Mail clients (on all platforms) have driven me to the despair of settling on mutt. I don’t really favour terminal apps, but making GUI mail apps that do IMAP well, with a UI from this century, without consuming a supercomputer’s worth of resources, seems beyond the 2022 tech industry (or perhaps its economics).

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You made my day! :joy:

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I should have mentioned that I have switched between Wayland and Xorg and the problem remains the same. I still run xorg because of other behaviors of Wayland that bug me.

By going blank I mean I get a completely black screen (same as when the HDMI cable is disconnected.

It seems to be related when changing window focus from Firefox back to evolution when the screen blanks. The other issues seems to be related totally with Evolution (messages in bottom bar on evolution that seem to take forever to clear). When screen is black it is just a guessing game where the mouse is positioned but with luck I hit the Firefox window and my display returns, however when I try to return focus to Evolution by clicking in the Evolution window the whole things starts over. After some period of time it seem to cure it self and return to normal function until at some point it decides to act up again.

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I was reading in a other topic here that someone had problem to open emails in a new window in evolution. Having the preview on the bottom activated was a workaround to read the mails without opening in a new window.

You have tagged nvidia and amd, does this mean that you have two GPU s?
Could you please give us more info’s as :

inxi -Fzx in terminal and post the output as </> Preformatted text here.

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I have only one GPU.

[root@odyssey: ~ ]
SU: # inxi -Fzx
System:
  Kernel: 5.18.5-100.fc35.x86_64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc
    v: 2.37-17.fc35 Desktop: GNOME v: 41.7
    Distro: Fedora release 35 (Thirty Five)
Machine:
  Type: Desktop Mobo: ASUSTeK model: ROG STRIX X570-E GAMING v: Rev X.0x
    serial: <filter> UEFI: American Megatrends v: 3604 date: 04/14/2021
Battery:
  Device-1: hidpp_battery_0 model: Logitech Wireless Mouse
    charge: 55% (should be ignored) status: discharging
  Device-2: hidpp_battery_1 model: Logitech Wireless Keyboard K540/K545
    charge: 100% (should be ignored) status: discharging
CPU:
  Info: 16-core model: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Zen 2
    rev: 0 cache: L1: 1024 KiB L2: 8 MiB L3: 64 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 2443 high: 3500 min/max: 2200/4761 boost: enabled
    cores: 1: 2200 2: 2200 3: 2200 4: 2200 5: 2200 6: 2200 7: 2200 8: 2200
    9: 2200 10: 3500 11: 3500 12: 3500 13: 3500 14: 2200 15: 2200 16: 2200
    17: 2200 18: 2200 19: 2200 20: 2200 21: 2200 22: 2200 23: 2200 24: 3500
    25: 2200 26: 2200 27: 2200 28: 2200 29: 2200 30: 2200 31: 3500 32: 2200
    bogomips: 223998
  Flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA TU106 [GeForce GTX 1650] vendor: ASUSTeK driver: nvidia
    v: 510.68.02 arch: Turing bus-ID: 0a:00.0
  Display: server: X.Org v: 1.20.14 with: Xwayland v: 21.1.4 driver: X:
    loaded: nvidia unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,nouveau,vesa
    gpu: nvidia,nvidia-nvswitch resolution: 3840x2160~30Hz
  OpenGL: renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650/PCIe/SSE2
    v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 510.68.02 direct render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: NVIDIA TU106 High Definition Audio vendor: ASUSTeK
    driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus-ID: 0a:00.1
  Device-2: AMD Starship/Matisse HD Audio vendor: ASUSTeK
    driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus-ID: 0c:00.4
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.18.5-100.fc35.x86_64 running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.0 running: no
  Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.51 running: yes
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 driver: iwlwifi v: kernel bus-ID: 04:00.0
  IF: wlp4s0 state: down mac: <filter>
  Device-2: Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE vendor: ASUSTeK driver: r8169 v: kernel
    port: e000 bus-ID: 05:00.0
  IF: enp5s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
  Device-3: Intel I211 Gigabit Network vendor: ASUSTeK driver: igb
    v: kernel port: d000 bus-ID: 06:00.0
  IF: enp6s0 state: down mac: <filter>
  IF-ID-1: virbr0 state: down mac: <filter>
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Intel AX200 Bluetooth type: USB driver: btusb v: 0.8
    bus-ID: 1-6:3
  Report: rfkill ID: hci0 rfk-id: 0 state: up address: see --recommends
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 8.19 TiB used: 1.59 TiB (19.4%)
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Corsair model: Force MP600 size: 931.51 GiB
    temp: 40.9 C
  ID-2: /dev/sda vendor: Seagate model: ST4000DM004-2CV104 size: 3.64 TiB
    temp: 31 C
  ID-3: /dev/sdb vendor: Seagate model: ST4000DM004-2CV104 size: 3.64 TiB
    temp: 28 C
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 97.87 GiB used: 54.35 GiB (55.5%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3
  ID-2: /boot size: 769.8 MiB used: 250.9 MiB (32.6%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
  ID-3: /boot/efi size: 249.7 MiB used: 14 MiB (5.6%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
  ID-4: /home size: 1.97 TiB used: 1.38 TiB (70.2%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda1
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 50 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%)
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p4
  ID-2: swap-2 type: zram size: 8 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram0
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 34.0 C mobo: 32.0 C gpu: nvidia temp: 35 C
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A gpu: nvidia fan: 27%
Info:
  Processes: 517 Uptime: 4h 52m Memory: 31.16 GiB used: 4.54 GiB (14.6%)
  Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.3.1 clang: 13.0.0 Packages: 29
  note: see --pkg Shell: Bash v: 5.1.8 inxi: 3.3.16
[root@odyssey: ~ ]
SU: #

Not sure how to add tags for nvidia and amd but I didn’t tag those.

10

After an extended time trying to figure this out I will update you on my problem. It seems to be related to Firefox. If I use Opera instead of Firefox I do not see the extended periods of blacked out screens ( like my video has disconnected) and evolution seems to work better. I still see the messages at the bottom of evolution window about "Storing changes in folder “On this Computer: Inbox” or “Saving user interface state” or “Generating message list”. They just don’t lock everything up as long.

All in all I have much better responsiveness from my system. Don’t really know what any of this means except if I let Firefox be the default browser it destroys the performance of this system.

11

I fixed it.

12

The problems mentioned above seemed to have cleared for approximately a month and a half, but have returned after the last couple of updates (from about Oct 24th or 25th). Not seeing black screens that last but a few seconds but evolution has very long delays in responding to commands such as trying to open an email. I also get error opening directory /: not a directory. Then when I retry I get the message open.

Maybe someone will see this and recognize how to fix.

Thanks

13

This sounds like it may be a different issue than your original post. It might be worth making a new post (and linking back here for context if you think it’s helpful) since having a specific scope for the problem you’re trying to solve might help us give you better feedback/advice.