Hello, I had a conversation in the #xapian IRC channel for possible ways of dealing with small systems:
ojwb> enrico: http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/533 ojwb> sounds like apt-xapian-index should look at the memory size and on small memory machine either disable itself or set XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD lower ojwb> oops, I managed to delete the reporter's account while purging all the spammers who've signed up recently, which took his reply with it ojwb> "Its a Debian system, but the reason the wheels spun were it was using more resources than available system memory (max 32 mB) when doing the indexing, you may wish to address this part." enrico> ojwb: ack enrico> ojwb: it's not supposed to be installed on smaller machines, but indeed the idea to disable itself if memory is low is a good one enrico> ojwb: I don't know anything about XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD though ojwb> you can set it in the environment to control how often changes get automatically flushed ojwb> default it 10000 document adds or replaces or deletes The best idea is probably, by default, NOT to run at all on small systems, unless some configuration key is set somewhere. The trick is how to reliably detect 'small systems'. I wonder if we could have some general debian configuration somewhere that says "this is a small/embedded system, so please turn off nonessential high end features". Alternatively, we can of course tweak XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD to be proportional to the available memory, with an upper bound. I do not have a suitable system, however, to use for testing the tweak. Or better, I do have a NSLU2 I could use, for example, but I have no idea what kind of level of performance I should consider tolerable and what not. Another interesting thing could be to disable full reindexing when on battery. Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enr...@enricozini.org>
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