On Friday 30 March 2007 13:38, Joe Shaw wrote: > Hi, > > On 3/29/07, Carlos F Lange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Thursday 29 March 2007 08:14, Peter Van Lone wrote: > > > 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. > 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. For these cases, it would be enough for the indexer to run in preset times as a cron job. I would like to see the config GUI offer the user to run the indexer at a set time (then ask for the time) or continuously while logged in. In addition, right-clicking in the taskbar icon (Kerry in my case) should offer the option to start and to stop the deamon immediately. 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. > > Another thing I just noticed. My .beagle/ directory is 1.6GB! > > Is this normal? Can the size of this cache be controlled? > > (My home is ~40GB, ~15GB of that are pictures, sounds and binary > > data.) > > The size of the index obviously can vary a lot with the type of data, > but we estimate that the index is 5-10% the size of your data, so you > fall into that range. > > You can reclaim some space by deleting the ~/.beagle/TextCache > directory. That directory is used to quickly extract text for > showing "snippets" in the user interface, but isn't essential to the > running of Beagle. If you delete it, you won't get snippets for most > documents. It is probably a couple hundred MB. Here are the sizes of my .beagle directory: ~/.beagle> du -sh * 8.0K config 484M Indexes 265M Log 0 socket 0 socket-helper 1.2G TextCache 2.1M ToIndex 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). 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! Thanks, Carlos FL -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
