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: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org