Meta tagging on only newly created files is a better way, since the media-oriented view of modern operating systems applies to what's added after, such as movies, music, and pictures, and Microsoft kinda sorta has gone that direction, but unfortunately there's a scarcity of files with actual tags. If users tagged directories and files, with filters on the type without an indexer arbitrarily doing everything in a particular area of the filesystem, then the performance would be much better and the goal of the indexing would be met.
Since the web has gone the way of categorization and tagging, so as places (Geotagging) and media on youtube as an example, I think this is a better avenue to design the indexer around, versus the current bloated binary database with hundreds of thousands of non-user files being indexed. Tracker, Beagle, Spotlight and Windows Search all base everything around the actual files, later classifying on file type after the fact, which is a huge performance hit. At least on Vista it excludes the main drive and only does the user's data, such as Start Menu and Documents folders. James On Oct 15, 2008, at 10:55 AM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, James Cornell wrote: > >> You can disable .DS_STORE creation on network filesystems, which >> should ease some of the stress. You can also outright disable the >> indexer or tell it places not to do it. > > This bug entry shows the considerable pain that trackerd has been > causing for Ubuntu users: > > https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tracker/+bug/131983 > > A Google search shows thousands of cries of anguish regarding this > search indexer. > > It seems that Windows and Mac have decided that the core focus of > the OS should be to allow users to perform "Google" like searches of > their files. This causes lots of performance problems during normal > system use. Perhaps I am weird but I use a heirarchical filesystem > layout and intelligent naming to help me keep track of things and > rarely need to consult some sort of search "oracle" as if I had been > struck by a stroke or advanced senility. > > This indexer tool should definitely default to "off" for Solaris. > > Bob > ====================================== > Bob Friesenhahn > bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ > GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ >
