Re: [opensuse] Beagle Configuration

though I think there should be options to control WHEN the
initial and on-going indexing occurs. Basically, we should easily
be able to get to menus that let us control all aspects of both
services.
I second that!
Although beagled-helper runs with nice of 15 (it is at zero now,
but I remember it was 15 when it was working) it still competes
with other resources. And on a laptop, you want to have complete
control because of the power usage too and maybe set the indexing
when the laptop is plugged in, in addition to a particular time
There is an option in the Beagle preferences to turn off all indexing
when on battery power. I believe this is in the version that shipped
with 10.2.
Oh, I see that now. So, this aspect should be covered.
But the default seems to be to keep search while on battery (at least on
my desktop; I don't have my laptop with me now) and I would definitely
suggest this to be reverted, because the hard disk is a big battery
consumer.

Since Beagle will be indexing only files that just changed, my
experience is that with sufficient RAM the I/O load increase cause by
Beagle is pretty trivial. If your system is starved for RAM then of
course if will grind the drives.

A previous message in this thread mentions two machines each with 256Mb!
Of course Zen and/or Beagle thrash such a machine. Maybe the sanity of
systems with 900MHz/1GHz processors having only 256Mb should be what is
in question.

The openSUSE manual says: "At least 256 MB; 512 MB recommended" If
someone is at the "least" end of the scale they should expect
concomitant performance.

Maybe we can add additional control to this. What did you guys have
in mind?
OK, here are my thoughts.
The instantaneous search feature looks cool, but has very little
practical relevance IMHO.
I think I'll never really need to search the e-mails, or the IM chats or
documents I'm writing right now. If I want to search a new document I
just obtained, usually the built-in search in the document viewer is
good enough. The only case that comes to mind, when I would need Beagle
to search something right away, is the case of data mining many new
docs, such as the 1600 PDFs I mentioned before. Beagle becomes most
useful when I am trying to find old documents or messages, that I don't
know where I have placed.

I think this depends on how you use Beagle. Beagle is most useful if it
is the first place you go rather than trying to browse to a file. If I
start downloading documents in a web browser, Beagle knows about them,
and their contents, right away.

For these cases, it would be enough for the
indexer to run in preset times as a cron job.

You'd have to create a cron-job for each user; which would mean the
user would have to be in the cron/at group, etc... And for laptop users
where the system is erratically booted it would be problematic.

In addition, right-clicking in the taskbar icon (Kerry in my case)
should offer the option to start and to stop the deamon immediately.

I agree here.

This would allow me to have those 1600 new files indexed right away in
that one case I needed it, while the usual indexing happens when I
sleep.
I think these 2 additional features would satisfy the increased control
that Peter mentioned and I supported above.

I don't think there is any real serious problem desperate to be solved.
It seems to be working very well with minimal impact on systems with
sufficient resources.

I don't see the size of TextCache as a problem on my desktop, but
definitely on the laptop, where disk space is tight. May I suggest
another option in the settings, where I can choose not to keep a
TextCache (with a nice help info explaining to the user its
consequences).

Agree.

Couldn't it also be mildly compressed, so that
decompression time is negligible, but space requirements are improved?
Another thing that could definitely be cleaned up is the Log. I have
logs of a week or so (oldest is March 24) and the Log directory is
250MB big!

My .beagle/Log is a scant 8Mb on my Laptop which I use all the time.

--
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Adam Tauno Williams
Network & Systems Administrator
Consultant - http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com
Developer - http://www.opengroupware.org

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