> > > > 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. -- -- Adam Tauno Williams Network & Systems Administrator Consultant - http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com Developer - http://www.opengroupware.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
