Proxy support in Evolution

One of the key features that is expected out of any application that communicates over a network is talking over a proxy connection. Evolution has been lacking this feature for quite some time and I implemented a quick support around SLED10 release with a limitation that "Authenticated Proxy" configurations are not supported. Now, its time to do something about it and I came up with something called a Network Preferences option in Evolution that looks similar to that of gnome-network-preferences capplet. I had to take this approach as a lot of Evolution-KDE users complained proxy not working as the respective gconf entries were missing.

Following is the screenshot of the Network preferences window in Evolution:

It uses libsoup for resolving hostnames and other SOCKADDR related processing.

Evolution Exchange Performance Series - Chapter 2 - Public Folder Loading

Around a month back started working on issues surrounding Exchange Public folders from subscribing to accessing/using them. A tracker bug was already present in BGO and the most famous among them are 268412, 347811 and 346728. As I just took over the responsibility of Evolution Exchange connector around August 2006 and then had a month-long sick leave because of Chikungunya, it was a slow start for me - reading through code, docs, MS articles, webDAV references etc. After a week of analysis, found out the issue in Setting up folder hierarchies - which is done during the startup and it goes into a recursive loop setting up hierarchies for all folders, including public folders. When an organization has quite a lot of nested-public-folders, Evolution will take a minimum of 30 mins to start.

The complete fix was done in two-phases.
Phase-1:
--------
Do not scan public-folders recursively during startup.
Phase-2:
--------
Load folders on demand. This enabled us to achieve the maximum performance during subscribing to Public folders.
Any performance work needs to provide supporting data and here it is: (My test server has close to 250 public folders with a maximum depth of 21 subfolders)

S.No	Description of Test/task	Patch (Sec)	<=2.9.4 (Sec)
1	Configure an exchange account Restart Evolution	7	65
2	Folder->Subscriptions Selectthe configured Exchange account Note time taken to show the“All Public Folders”	3	4
3	Expand “All PublicFolders” Note time taken to display folder list	< 1	168
4	Time taken totraverse to maximum depth folder	8	330

Memory consumption:
Before expanding a folder (in the folder->subscriptions dialog)

	Patch (MB)	<=2.9.4 (MB)
Virtual Memory	152.8	154.6
RSS	13.4	15.1
Shared	9.1	9.2

After expanding a folder:

	Patch (MB)	<=2.9.4 (MB)
Virtual Memory	152.8	201.6
RSS	13.4	62
Shared	9.1	9.2

Actual memory consumption:

	Patch (MB)	<=2.9.4 (MB)
Virtual Memory	0	47
RSS	0	46.9
Shared	0	0

Note: Memory consumption data is taken using gnome-system-monitor and thus difference in Bytes are not shown above. Columns showing 0 would definitely have a difference at least in bytes.
Memory consumption to traverse to the maximum depth folder:

	Patch (MB)	<=2.9.4 (MB)
Virtual Memory	152.8	246.9
RSS	13.4	107.4
Shared	9.1	9.2

The fix also improved the overall folder loading performance.