Chandler PIM uses Berkeley DB internally. I recently noticed that db
recovery was very slow on my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop running Windows
XP. Another Inspiron 8500 at the office does the db recovery in about 18
seconds while it takes well over a minute on mine. The database takes
about 180 MB on disk.

No other Windows, OSX or Linux machine we have tried this on exhibits
the same problem. I tested that disabling antivirus software had no
effect on the timing.

What makes this really bizarre (well, at least in my opinion) is that
when I run VMWare on this machine and run the same test on Debian Linux
guest, the db recovery runs in about 24 seconds!

We are using Berkeley DB 4.3.29.

Has anyone else experienced such mystery slowness on some machines? Any
tests I could run to determine what might be causing this?

More information about this case is at
https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4801

--
Heikki Toivonen

I haven't experienced this, but it sounds as if there is some
filesystem or hard disk setting that's causing it. Is the system at
100% CPU while recovery is running?

Can you check the disk cache settings, and whether there's some NTFS
readahead setting that could have been changed on this laptop?

Michael.