lib: autocommit after some number of completed transactions

This change addresses two known issues with large sets of changes to
the database.  The first is that as reported by Steven Allen [1],
notmuch commits are not "flushed" when they complete, which means that
if there is an open transaction when the database closes (or e.g. the
program crashes) then all changes since the last commit will be
discarded (nothing is irrecoverably lost for "notmuch new", as the
indexing process just restarts next time it is run).  This does not
really "fix" the issue reported in [1]; that seems rather difficult
given how transactions work in Xapian. On the other hand, with the
default settings, this should mean one only loses less than a minutes
worth of work.  The second issue is the occasionally reported "storm"
of disk writes when notmuch finishes. I don't yet have a test for
this, but I think committing as we go should reduce the amount of work
when finalizing the database.

[1]: id:20151025210215.GA3754@stebalien.com

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/lib/database-private.h b/lib/database-private.h
index 1a73dacc..9706c17e 100644
--- a/lib/database-private.h
+++ b/lib/database-private.h
@@ -212,6 +212,11 @@ struct _notmuch_database {
     char thread_id_str[17];
     uint64_t last_thread_id;
 
+    /* How many transactions have successfully completed since we last committed */
+    int transaction_count;
+    /* when to commit and reset the counter */
+    int transaction_threshold;
+
     /* error reporting; this value persists only until the
      * next library call. May be NULL */
     char *status_string;