On Friday 30 March 2007, Joe Shaw wrote: > Hi, > > On 3/30/07, Randall R Schulz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
