Re: [opensuse] Beagle Configuration

On Friday 30 March 2007, Joe Shaw wrote:
Hi,

On 3/30/07, Randall R Schulz <rschulz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Beagle uses inotify for this -- in fact, inotify was basically
written *for* Beagle with its use cases in mind. inotify is a kernel
service, so you actually don't need a separate daemon to use it.

OK. The whole point was whether or not it had to perform user-level
polling, which the old FAM (File Alteration Monitory -- note: I had the
name wrong) used to do.

Right. Beagle doesn't do any polling for file changes if you have a
system with inotify. I believe these days FAM also uses inotify.

I think this is a problem worth addressing: Surely there's some way to
minimize the cost upon start-up? It's probably why some people (those
whose computers don't run 24/7) experience Beagle as so intrusive.

Actually this *is* something that we try to do gracefully. We monitor
the load on the system to calculate a delay of when next to crawl a
small set of directories, and in more recent versions Beagle has a
very "nice" CPU priority and instructs the kernel not to automatically
give it a higher one.

What we don't do is immediately crawl through all the directories
adding watches because that was a pretty serious thrashing problem.
(It's basically the same thing as doing "find -type d ~". Painful.)
We did that in very, very early versions of Beagle and it was unusable
even for us developers of it.

I really suspect that for a lot of people it's the cron job that gives
them such a negative impression, because that is designed to be a once
off, middle-of-the-night process and it doesn't do any sort of
throttling based on system load.

Thanks,
Joe

This thread really does show the unfortunate direction that software
development has taken even in open source: The simplest package is a rube
goldberg-like conglomeration of pre-packaged code and requires 50 and 100
other packages, each one recursively depended on it's own set of libs and
scripts and packages!!!
According to my 10.1 yast2, Beagle "requires" 65 different items before the
dependencies are satisfied!!!! is too complex for what it does and / or does
what it does in a confused, roundabout and cpu time hogging manner. That is
just taken as fact above and most of the dialog is about minimizing the
perceived impact of the application instead of fundamentally correcting
it!!!. it boggles my mind when my very average amd3800+ does 2,400,000,000
operations four bytes at a time every second and an indexing application just
takes all of that for hours!!!
Yes, i am an old timer and yes i do remember that the bootstrap on the pdp-8
was only 8 lines long, yes i used to toggle the switches to load the index
register to the accumulator, but i would not expect that today. On the other
hand i can not believe the inefficiency in all sofware except games and math
packages in today's software, both free and for $$. I used to run fea
programs that would take 10-12 days of 24/7 work on a dedicated 386, now
problems 1,000 larger can be run in minutes or a couple of hours, that makes
me smile. But it truly is a wonder why it takes 5 seconds for oo to start
*with* the fast start installed, why a simple update list can not be found
and processed in a few seconds and why kmail loads stuff for 3 seconds before
it opens a window!
Creating a darned index should definitely take less time than solving 500,000
equations with 500,000 unknowns about 100 times over, updating the silly
thing should be almost instantaneous!!!
So here is a simple suggestion: PLEASE simplify the package and put in some
fresh sections, free of pre-canned software! When the list of dependencies is
around 65 different items long, the end result can only be a cpu overheating
beast, that does not take rocket science to figure out. I am a very average
user and probably can not provide detailed debug feedback without a lot of
hand holding, but, if someone would like to try fresh code, i would be
willing to test shtuff after 4 May, can't do it before.
As things are now, beagle and zen/zmd/rug & co are all removed from my 10.1
and 10.2 installs and any possible new setup will have them removed from the
initial package list. I wish I could also eliminate libzypp, but yast needs
it and i am not willing to put all my marbles in smart...
dimitris
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