On 05/14/2010 08:43 AM, Wout Mertens wrote:
Hi group,
I noticed with sadness the rather disappointing review of the DesktopCouch
feature of Ubuntu at Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/05/lucid-dream-ars-reviews-ubuntu-1004.ars/9
"The take-away point is that the amount of latency and CPU overhead that
DesktopCouch introduces is just not conducive to building responsive desktop applications
that run on a wide range of ordinary consumer hardware. In cases where the number of
records is in the tens of thousands, it's more sensible to use SQLite and use
DesktopCouch only for the parts that need to be synchronized."
I wonder where the lag is introduced. DesktopCouch is, as I understand it, a
Python API for storing and synchronizing user data like settings and chat logs,
using CouchDB as the backend.
That is correct: it's built on top of python-couchdb and is meant as a
library that allows users to synchronize structured data between their
machines and with a cloud, as well as allowing different applications to
use the same backend for the same kind of data. (So for instance storing
contacts from evolution in couch, and then having them accessible from
any other application that is interested in contacts.)
Is CouchDB too slow to use on a desktop system as a desktop database?
By no means: I don't think any of the issues the gwibber developers have
run into are necessarily CouchDB problems.
I think it's a mixture of a relatively young and fluid API
(desktopcouch), and some places where Gwibber could have optimized their
usage of desktopcouch/couchdb: right now it adds every incoming
twitter/identi.ca/facebook message to the db one by one as it arrives,
and immediately requeries the view. If you follow a lot of people, or
worse, have a search stream open, this means the views are continually
being rebuilt, and you never get the speed benefit of a prebuilt view.
It would help if incoming messages were added in bulk every x seconds,
and the views only queried once per minute or so. Personally, I've not
had issues with gwibber in quite a while. I think a lot of the issues in
desktopcouch (and some in Gwibber itself) have been found and ironed out.
--
eric casteleijn
https://code.launchpad.net/~thisfred
Canonical Ltd.
