Joe, Op Wednesday 28 March 2007 22:26:47 schreef Joe Shaw:

On 3/28/07, Michael Letourneau wrote:

...

I know many (most?) dislike beagle and turn it off, but I actually have a need to use it right now, and thought it would be a good solution to finding some information I have mis-placed.

I'm the main developer of Beagle, so I'm certainly interested to know why people turn it off.  Is it a lack of necessity, is it a failure in user experience, is it misbehaving in some way (including CPU pegging or memory hogging)?  This is all useful information to me, and I want to fix any bugs people come across.

it's hogging my system. Sometimes my desktop just hangs for 30 seconds or more! Super annoying! I have my /home nfs mounted and it seems in combination with beagle this is lethal. Another annoyance is that it runs with the highest priority possible, while (as it is a background) process should run with a very low prority. After I removed beagle all this is gone, and as kde comes with its own desktop search function, there is no desire on my side for beagle. -- Richard Bos We are borrowing the world of our children, It is not inherited from our parents. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Rajko M. wrote:

On Wednesday 28 March 2007 16:04, Richard Bos wrote:

...

it's hogging my system. Sometimes my desktop just hangs for 30 seconds or more!

...

...

Another annoyance is that it runs with the highest priority possible, while (as it is a background) process should run with a very low prority. After I removed beagle all this is gone, and as kde comes with its own desktop search function, there is no desire on my side for beagle.

Beagle is not alone, the update of manpages is also tax on computer..

Someone came on idea to run few processes that use hard disk heavily at startup which gives very bad image of openSUSE.

I'm asking myself how many users ditched openSUSE when after installation it was slow. I know how to see what is the reason, and stop processes, but 99% of new users will be just disappointed and go away.

The bad joke is continuing with 10.3 alpha.

Is it indexing of any kind that important to make first experience with SUSE poor as it can be.

Opensuse is slow on my old hardware, but Windows 2000 ran faster on this hardware than Opensuse does. It would be nice if it ran a little faster, but even though it is slow, I have come to like Opensuse and Linux. I have almost a gigabyte of memory and it is sorely taxed by the system. Out of the 768MB of memory I usually have around 130 to 200MB free memory. This does cause me some concern, but again, I like the operating system and I wait for it to do its thing. I am in no hurry, so I wait. I guess if I was in a heavy production environment I would look for a new Linux OS, but I like the security and the KDE desktop. I realize with a faster processor and more RAM I would probably see an improvement in I/O; and when I find the proper hardware to run Opensuse, I will build a system to handle over-taxation the OS causes. Until then I am happy to wait. As a newcomer to Linux, and I've tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu, I still like Opensuse the best even though it does run slow. Dwain -- Dwain Alford Alford Design Group P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594 telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619 email: dwain@alford-design-group.com web: http://www.alford-design-group.com "The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression." Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Magnus Boman wrote:

On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 19:16 -0500, dwain wrote:

...

Opensuse is slow on my old hardware, but Windows 2000 ran faster on this hardware than Opensuse does. It would be nice if it ran a little faster, but even though it is slow, I have come to like Opensuse and Linux. I have almost a gigabyte of memory and it is sorely taxed by the system. Out of the 768MB of memory I usually have around 130 to 200MB free memory. This does cause me some concern, but again, I like the operating system and I wait for it to do its thing. I am in no hurry, so I wait.

How to you check for free memory? You know that Linux uses available memory for file system cache? If/when that memory is needed by an app, the file system cache will give it back.

...

Dwain

Cheers, Magnus

Check out "ksysguard" a neat performance monitor at least on 10.2 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

David Brodbeck wrote:

Rajko M. wrote:

...

Beagle is not alone, the update of manpages is also tax on computer..

Not to mention ZMD. I thought I was going to have to turn off beagle, but once I removed ZMD my system stopped becoming unresponsive and I no longer felt the need to disable beagle. I've never had beagle make my system unusable but ZMD used to do it all the time. It was tempting to blame beagle because beagle indexing and ZMD updates were often running at the same time, and the combination of the two is a real killer.

I have not noticed a system slowdown. 2.4-GHZ Pentium 4 and 1-GB of RAM. What does your system consist of so that I can learn more to share with others? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

David Brodbeck wrote:

Rajko M. wrote:

...

Beagle is not alone, the update of manpages is also tax on computer..

Not to mention ZMD. I thought I was going to have to turn off beagle, but once I removed ZMD my system stopped becoming unresponsive and I no longer felt the need to disable beagle. I've never had beagle make my system unusable but ZMD used to do it all the time. It was tempting to blame beagle because beagle indexing and ZMD updates were often running at the same time, and the combination of the two is a real killer.

As a new user, what is ZMD and is it necessary for system functionality? Dwain -- Dwain Alford Alford Design Group P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594 telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619 email: dwain@alford-design-group.com web: http://www.alford-design-group.com "The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression." Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Rajko M. wrote:

On Wednesday 28 March 2007 20:39, dwain wrote:

...

David Brodbeck wrote:

...

Rajko M. wrote:

...

Beagle is not alone, the update of manpages is also tax on computer..

Not to mention ZMD. I thought I was going to have to turn off beagle, but once I removed ZMD my system stopped becoming unresponsive and I no longer felt the need to disable beagle. I've never had beagle make my system unusable but ZMD used to do it all the time. It was tempting to blame beagle because beagle indexing and ZMD updates were often running at the same time, and the combination of the two is a real killer.

As a new user, what is ZMD and is it necessary for system functionality?

Dwain,

It is: http://en.opensuse.org/Zmd

and it is not necessary, since YaST is doing for years all that zmd should do for individual user, but without hogging resources on smaller machines, ie. without problems :-)

Install opensuseupdater if you want notifications about security updates. I wanted.

Than remove zmd, zen-updater, zen-installer, zen-remover and rug.

thanks for all of the advise. i removed a lot of unwanted programs and it seemed that with the dependencies stripped the system bare. i haven't rebooted yet, but i'll find out what's what here shortly. gotta reboot. cross your fingers. dwain -- Dwain Alford Alford Design Group P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594 telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619 email: dwain@alford-design-group.com web: http://www.alford-design-group.com "The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression." Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Rajko M. wrote:

On Wednesday 28 March 2007 22:36, dwain wrote:

...

thanks for all of the advise. i removed a lot of unwanted programs and it seemed that with the dependencies stripped the system bare. i haven't rebooted yet, but i'll find out what's what here shortly. gotta reboot. cross your fingers.

dwain

Did I mentioned if it complains on dependencies to ignore them. Installation pattern works fine without zen stuff. No, I didn't. I guess that will be a lot to reinstall.

It wanted to do the same here, but I choose to ignore dependencies and the system works fine.

Now you tell me. ;-) I figured that out on the third reinstall. Good info though, but hopefully I won't be reinstalling anytime soon. ;-) Dwain -- Dwain Alford P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594 telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619 "The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression." Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Thursday 29 March 2007 13:50, Billie Erin Walsh wrote:

There is one (1) aspect of zen that I DO like. There are certain packages that I use that do not come from SuSE sources, Gramps for one. Yast can't seem to install from my Download Directory since about 10.0. It won't accept it as an install source at all. If I right click on it there are two (2) "Open With" > "Install Software" things to choose from. The second one will do a VERY good job of installing the software. The first one doesn't do much of anything as far as I can tell.

If I click on the RPM in Konqueror it, I guess, opens to another thing with two boxes at the top. One says "Install With Yast" and the other says to make it an install source. OK, Install With Yast - Yes - "No source available". In 9.X [ whatever I was using ] Yast worked just fine for installing things like Gramps from my Download Directory. Never argued one bit.

As I recall that was because a command (installation_source or something similar I think it was called) got replaced around 10.0 or 10.1, but Konqueror "Install With YaST" still tried to use it, so of course it failed. The command createrepo can be used to make a directory of downloaded rpms visible to YaST as an installation source. I think this can be done through Yast -> Installation Sources as well. After that you should be able to install using konqueror. Createrepo was not installed by default however, and the command needed to be run everytime an rpm package was added to or removed from the directory.

In this one instance Yast does not do as well as zen. In every other instance Yast is far superior to zen and Smart [ rather more like STUPID IMHO ].

No comment :-) -- Don -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Wed 28 Mar 2007 23:51, Rajko M. wrote:

Beagle is not alone, the update of manpages is also tax on computer..

Someone came on idea to run few processes that use hard disk heavily at startup which gives very bad image of openSUSE.

In SuSE 10.2 system-slowing processes seem to be a feature . . . APT is memory-demanding [ SMART seems lighter] friendly greetings -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Kevin Donnelly wrote:

Wouldn't it be possible to have them look at the system time and not run unless the time is between 01.00 and 05.00 (for instance)? I've been using SUSE for years, and this annoys me, so what must it be like for a new user?

There is now a sysconfig variable to set when cron.daily runs, but it gives the time, not a range. I still find it a big improvement over the last few versions. This is on 10.2. -- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 10.2 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Joe Shaw wrote:

On 3/28/07, Michael Letourneau wrote:

...

I know many (most?) dislike beagle and turn it off, but I actually have a need to use it right now, and thought it would be a good solution to finding some information I have mis-placed.

I'm the main developer of Beagle, so I'm certainly interested to know why people turn it off. Is it a lack of necessity, is it a failure in user experience, is it misbehaving in some way (including CPU pegging or memory hogging)? This is all useful information to me, and I want to fix any bugs people come across.

My main issue is that I can not get it to run only on off hours. When it is running I am unable to use my machine for anything worth while. It hogs most memory and CPU usuage. I have problems with even the CLI.

I know a lot of people don't want to deal with debugging software, but especially in a community distribution I hope there are those who will help, rather than uninstalling it as a workaround for some issue.

The problem is how do you attempt to debug it when you can not even do CLI while it is running. For example if I ssh to the box running beagle... I am unable to get a connection. I am unable to mount or unmount a NFS share from the machine. Only when beagle is running. Thanks, -- Boyd Gerber ZENEZ 1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah 84047 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Hi, On 3/28/07, Boyd Lynn Gerber wrote:

My main issue is that I can not get it to run only on off hours. When it is running I am unable to use my machine for anything worth while. It hogs most memory and CPU usuage. I have problems with even the CLI.

There's an important distinction to be made here, and I'd like to know which of these (or both) are biting you. The more resource-intensive indexing process is broken into two parts: (a) A systemwide crawler which is run from cron. This is very much like the updatedb process you have if you install findutils-locate or use another distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu. This is used to index systemwide resources like application launchers and system documentation. This is a one-off process run once a day. This process is called "beagle-build-index" in "ps ax" and is run from the "beagle-crawl-system" cronjob. (b) A per-user component which crawls your home directory and indexes your personal data. This (unless configured otherwise) stays within your home dir and notices changes, additions, and removals in real time. This process exists for only as long as you are logged in. These processes are called "beagled" and "beagled-helper" when you do a "ps ax". Right now (a) kicks off roughly every 24 hours. The problem is that it starts 15 minutes after you first installed the distro, so it often runs right in the middle of your day! This is very inconvenient, and I mentioned that elsewhere in the thread. Fortunately you can fix this by editing the /etc/sysconfig/cron file and set the DAILY_TIME variable to something like "04:00" to run at 4am. After editing this file, be sure to run "SuSEconfig". For (b), it's the core component of Beagle and you can't turn it off without turning search off altogether. But (b) is also designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, and so if it's eating your machine, it's a bug and we need to track down why.

The problem is how do you attempt to debug it when you can not even do CLI while it is running. For example if I ssh to the box running beagle... I am unable to get a connection. I am unable to mount or unmount a NFS share from the machine. Only when beagle is running.

Install the 0.2.16.3 version I mentioned earlier in the thread. First, it may have fixed the bug you were seeing in the first place. Secondly, if it didn't, it now runs at a higher "nice" level so interactivity should improve even if it does run away. And lastly, you can disable it running at login time and run it in the foreground and lots of debugging info with the "--fg --debug" options. Hopefully that will at least give you the opportunity to see what's going on and more importantly to kill it if need be. Thanks, Joe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Joe Shaw wrote:

Hi Michael,

On 3/28/07, Michael Letourneau wrote:

...

I know many (most?) dislike beagle and turn it off, but I actually have a need to use it right now, and thought it would be a good solution to finding some information I have mis-placed.

I'm the main developer of Beagle, so I'm certainly interested to know why people turn it off. Is it a lack of necessity, is it a failure in user experience, is it misbehaving in some way (including CPU pegging or memory hogging)? This is all useful information to me, and I want to fix any bugs people come across.

IMHO Beagle has a use for someone that needs that type program. However, for joe user that does e-mail, surfs the web and spends way to much money on ebay [ myself ] it is not really a necessity. I don't use it simply because I have no need for it. It could be offered as an option during install. Sort of like the option of KDE or Gnome. If someone has a need for it by all means install it. Otherwise don't. -- (o:]>*HUGGLES*<[:o) Billie Walsh The three best words in the English Language: "I LOVE YOU" Pass them on! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Wednesday 28 March 2007 01:26:47 pm Joe Shaw wrote:

Hi Michael,

On 3/28/07, Michael Letourneau wrote:

...

I know many (most?) dislike beagle and turn it off, but I actually have a need to use it right now, and thought it would be a good solution to finding some information I have mis-placed.

I'm the main developer of Beagle, so I'm certainly interested to know why people turn it off. Is it a lack of necessity, is it a failure in user experience, is it misbehaving in some way (including CPU pegging or memory hogging)? This is all useful information to me, and I want to fix any bugs people come across.

My experiences echo that of others on this list who have already posted. On new systems, with beagle turned on, response time becomes erratic or simply slow. These are very noticeable and become quickly annoying to me. Not really needing Bob - or beagle - or whatever the name is, I simply euthanize it. (Sorry, it is difficult not to poke fun at beagle.) As a rule, I turn beagle off immediately after install. (I have not done a 10.2 install yet, because without beagle and zmd running, 10.1 is perfectly stable for me and family.) I noticed that a few others mentioned the possibility of zmd being part of the cause. That may be - I tend to remove zmd as soon as possible as well after install, because I find it slow and tedious as well. So, basically, a system not running beagle or bob runs faster and is more responsive overall than one running beagle. I've found this on four separate systems, all fairly modern systems with at least 1G RAM and either Athlon or Pentium 4 processors. Thanks for listening! -- kai www.perfectreign.com || www.4thedadz.com www.filesite.org || www.donutmonster.com closing the doors that surround me so no one will ever penetrate complete my retreat just to wait for the day that never comes so i will laugh alone -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 3/29/07, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

Just to add the other side to this for any lurkers; I run, and use, and like Beagle. I also let ZMD run. And I have no performance problems, and neither of the machines are earth-shatteringly powerful.

me, too ... 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 have used beagle alot, and really like it. Partly because I am perhaps not as organized as I should be. It helps me find misplaced documents and emails and etc ... when I need them. P -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Hi, On 3/29/07, Carlos F Lange 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. Maybe we can add additional control to this. What did you guys have in mind?

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

...

...

...

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

On 3/31/07, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

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.

I have several machines running v10.2 with 256MB RAM, an Ahlon 1100, a P3/500 with 160MB running KDE, and a Xeon 2.67Ghz with 128MB as a server. My son's PowerBook G3/266 has 320MB RAM, as does my Thinkpad 390X with a P3/500.

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.

You can run a text mode install with 64MB RAM. You just have to have 256MB for the install. I've run several older machines with 64 or 96MB running text with no issues.

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.

Yep, I remove Beagle and ZMD as well as OpenOffice during install. Systems run really well without all those bloated programs running.

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.

And a lot of people are looking at Linux because it runs well on older systems. Having a base install with ZMD and Beagle isn't going to create a good user experience for a first time user wanting to move away from Windows and the Vista upgrade requirements if you consider a 2Ghz+ system a sufficient system. I have only 1 machine faster than 2Ghz. Why should I have a 3Ghz machine when my Dual Xeon 500Mhz machine with 512MB runs just fine after removing things I don't need? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Thu 29 Mar 2007 17:44, dwain.alford@gmail.com wrote:

only problem I have is there is no software remover

- maybe, logged in as root , at the console you could do something like : rpm -qa | grep beagle . . . that should show what beagle-related rpms are installed. next, you can do : rpm -e <name of installed stuff you want to remove> & that's it friendly greetings -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Wow! Thanks everyone for your responses. I'll respond individually to a number of you a little later. Broadly, it seems that people basically fall into two camps: (a) People who have no need or desire for Beagle. I can understand this. Some people are just inherently organized -- I do not understand these people. :) Others don't have enough data for desktop search to be truly useful for them. Others seem to get by using "find" or "locate", although these only search filenames. (Or, you can pair them up with xargs and grep and search contents, but this really only works for text-based files.) I guess these people have no need to search their email or IM conversations? (b) People who experience performance problems when running Beagle. There are a couple of known reasons for this, and possibly some more that I'm not aware of. I ask those who have experienced performance problems in the past to download Beagle 0.2.16.3 from the build service: http://software.opensuse.org/download/Beagle/openSUSE_10.2/ and let me know if this new version fares any better. I could rattle off a long list of bug fixes and go into technical detail about them here, but that's boring and really the only way we can see if things have improved is to try it. The cron job issue is a problem, and I'm going to try to work with colleagues to see if we can come up with a solution that works. Thanks, Joe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Hey Patrick, On 3/29/07, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

This is incorrect. There exists three goups.

...

(a) People who have no need or desire for Beagle. [...] (b) People who experience performance problems when running Beagle. [...]

(c) Those who use Beagle and like it and experienct no noticeable system degradation.

Indeed. Thanks for that. :)

The only problem I see with Beagle is the amount of disk space required for the indexes. 1.7G on my box, but I have a lot of disk space and the cost is nothing like what my first 32MB hard drive was. (I have two 8GB camera chips that combined cost less....)

Yeah, I can't believe I ever had a machine with just a 20 meg hard drive myself. Of course, I couldn't do a whole lot with it either. :) One possible remedy for the space issue (if it ever does become a problem) is that you could delete the ~/.beagle/TextCache directory. This contains the plain text of complex documents (like files inside an archive, or MS Office docs) that would take too long to extract from their source at search-time. They're used to generate the "snippets" of the document you see in results. Removing that directory means no more snippets, but I'm guessing that in your setup it'll save you 500 megs to a gig of space. Joe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 29/03/07 14:20 -0400, Joe Shaw wrote:

(b) People who experience performance problems when running Beagle.

8< --- snip --- >8

The cron job issue is a problem, and I'm going to try to work with colleagues to see if we can come up with a solution that works.

Perhaps beagle could check the load and decide whether it is appropriate to index at the given time? Of course said load is moot and may well require a thumb suck. Or the other way around and poll for low load times before it kicks off? Craig PS I fall into camp c though very occasionally camp b, so mostly positive feedback Joe. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Joe, On Thursday 29 March 2007 11:20, Joe Shaw wrote:

... I could rattle off a long list of bug fixes and go into technical detail about them ...

I'm still interested in knowing if you use the file modification daemon to minimize the amount of file scanning Beagle performs. And if not, why not? Could it be incorporated? I believe this is, at least in part, how Apple gets good performance from Spotlight.

Thanks, Joe

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

Joe, On Friday 30 March 2007 11:56, Joe Shaw wrote:

Hi Randall,

Sorry for the delay. It's been a very busy week in the Cambridge office, and I've been pretty overwhelmed by the feedback on the thread so far. (49 messages!)

No problem. Better busy than bored!

On 3/29/07, Randall R Schulz wrote:

...

On Thursday 29 March 2007 11:20, Joe Shaw wrote:

...

... I could rattle off a long list of bug fixes and go into technical detail about them ...

I'm still interested in knowing if you use the file modification daemon to minimize the amount of file scanning Beagle performs. And if not, why not? Could it be incorporated?

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.

For noticing file changes and such, Beagle depends heavily on inotify. We still have to crawl files when the Beagle daemon starts up though, ...

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.

... to set up inotify watches on all the directories it pays attention to and to notice and index any changes that may have happened while Beagle wasn't running.

Thanks for the explanation.

Joe

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

On Friday 30 March 2007, Joe Shaw wrote:

Hi,

On 3/30/07, Randall R Schulz 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: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Friday 30 March 2007 05:42:51 pm David Brodbeck wrote:

kanenas@hawaii.rr.com wrote:

...

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!!!

That's called "not reinventing the wheel." Often it's a good thing.

Yes. In terms of software development, it is a matter of philosophy. You can "reinvent the wheel" each time or use someone else's code. Generally it is better to use what already works.

One example: The zlib bug. You may remember this one -- a bug in a decompression routine that created a security hole. A lot of packages had zlib as a dependency. While they were all affected by the bug, fixing them was just a matter of replacing one shared library.

IIRC, this was pretty widespread.

Other packages simplified things, in the way you suggest, by simply including the zlib source code inside their own code. This meant they didn't have zlib as a dependency. But it also meant that every one of these packages had to be tracked down and fixed individually.

Yes, which is more trouble for fixing, and may - or may not - be a good thing. I'm honestly on the fence on this idea. Seeing how really convoluted and complicated the LFS is, I would tend to argue for putting libraries in one location. But that is a different argument.

I'd argue that nine times out of ten, using a pre-packaged library is both simpler and more reliable than rolling your own. It also saves space. Why should every package carry around all the code needed to, say, draw a window, when they can link to a single library that does it?

...

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!!!

Indexing is I/O-heavy, unlike equation-solving. This isn't a matter of CPU power. Until someone invents a mass storage medium where every location can be read instantly, indexing is going to be time-consuming, because you have to wait for data to be read off disk.

I'm waiting for the day when I can push my insignia, say, "computer!" and a nice lady's voice comes on asking me what I want. -- kai Free Compean and Ramos http://www.grassfire.org/142/petition.asp http://www.perfectreign.com/?q=node/46 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Kai Ponte wrote:

I'm waiting for the day when I can push my insignia, say, "computer!" and a nice lady's voice comes on asking me what I want.

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot. ;-) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 31 March 2007 09:22, Kai Ponte wrote: ...

Hey! I just realized my KMail spell checker is highlighting SUSE.

Um, guys?

Let me see SuSE ... highlighted S.u.S.E. not I guess they hadn't time to update the spellchecker ;-) PS. i.m.b.i.s. is not highlighted too which is German word "imbis" (kind of place where one can buy a food) with dots added. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Kai Ponte wrote:

On Saturday 31 March 2007 04:41:23 am James Knott wrote:

...

Kai Ponte wrote:

...

I'm waiting for the day when I can push my insignia, say, "computer!" and a nice lady's voice comes on asking me what I want.

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot. ;-)

LOL!

I remember the Infocom game, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where one of the goals was to find Tea. It is was powered the infinite improbability drive - or something like that.

It was also the favourite beverage of Captain Pickard on Star Trek TNG. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Friday 30 March 2007 14:47, Joe Shaw wrote:

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.

The guess is close enough. It is actually the I/O that is slow and faster CPU doesn't help much. Problem is when 2 or more programs are trying to access HD at the same time, and that happens on the first boot. Tweaking Beagle alone is not a solution. From your posts it seems that was done quite some work to keep it modest in requirements. I still have Beagle running and I can't complain on it's regular activity, but because of negative opinions that I have picked up around, I didn't tried to configure it. I'll see with 10.3 alpha. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 31 March 2007 10:04, Joe Shaw wrote:

Hi,

On 3/31/07, Rajko M. wrote:

...

It is actually the I/O that is slow and faster CPU doesn't help much. Problem is when 2 or more programs are trying to access HD at the same time, and that happens on the first boot.

Indeed. As CPUs get faster, the amount of time applications spend doing IO approaches 100%.

Yes. To load 1 GB from HD with 50 MB/s is 20s, after that it goes fast, but if there is 2000 files in that 1 GB, which can easily happen, the speed is down. I was wondering why is Knoppix booting faster from CD than from HD, but before above sentence I never tried to think about I/O impact on boot process. Maybe we ^H^H^H :-) you, developers, can consider booting the image in the similar way Knoppix does. Suspend to disk should be the right way, but right now it doesn't work here. I suspect that graphic (nVidia) initialization fails.

Beagle isn't started at boot though; the cron job is started 15 minutes after the first boot, and the per-user daemon is started something like 2 or 3 minutes after login (to avoid slowing it down). So slow boot times (which I agree have gotten worse) have nothing to do with Beagle.

I mentioned that a lot of negative opinions picked up around kept me from giving a test ride to Beagle.

There is some data and analysis on the boot process here:

http://en.opensuse.org/Boot_time

In fact, in there I say that a parallel boot process doesn't help much (and in fact may even hurt us) because most of the time is spend doing concurrent IO.

After this discussion, it seems clear that concurrent access to HD is bad. I'll try to see is it possible to switch to old style in 10.2 and post result on above page. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 31 March 2007 11:19, Kai Ponte wrote:

Just keep in mind what is loading when booting and just be glad you're not booting an IBM zSeries machine. :P

Is it longer than booting ext3 after 60 days ;-) -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 31 March 2007 12:52, Kai Ponte wrote:

On Saturday 31 March 2007 10:05:22 am Rajko M. wrote:

...

On Saturday 31 March 2007 11:19, Kai Ponte wrote:

...

Just keep in mind what is loading when booting and just be glad you're not booting an IBM zSeries machine. :P

Is it longer than booting ext3 after 60 days ;-)

Hmm...good to know. Will stick with Reiser.

Hey, that is only once every 60 days :-) but it is good that is only 30 GB partition ^_^

Let's see - the two times I actually was involved in booting the z890 at my last company, it took about two hours each.

Hmm, you can get something similar with SUSE 9.3 on 250 MHz / 128 MB and some old, slow hard disk if you install full blown KDE.

I think that's why they never let me to on-call support. My answer to all abend situations was - IPL.

My SUSE (there's that spell checker again!) machines get booted at least once - if not several - times a day depending on what I'm doing.

As you use KMail, see in Tools - Spelling and teach the checker what is right ;-) -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 3/31/07, Rajko M. wrote:

Hmm, you can get something similar with SUSE 9.3 on 250 MHz / 128 MB and some old, slow hard disk if you install full blown KDE.

Nope - I installed v10.1 on a PPro 200Mhz with 128MB EDO RAM and a slow 4GB IDE and I had a desktop in about 5 minutes. Now, A 486SX-25 with 32MB RAM would be bad. Actually, I beta tested v10.0 on a PowerMac 7500/100 with the original 601 chip at 100Mhz, no L2, and 80MB RAM with the onboard 2MB VRAM. That was still usable to an extent. The 40MB/s SCSI drive helped out so say the least. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 31 March 2007 10:49, Rajko M. wrote:

...

So slow boot times (which I agree have gotten worse) have nothing to do with Beagle.

I mentioned that a lot of negative opinions picked up around kept me from giving a test ride to Beagle.

But after configuring it to pick up few folders, I'll expand the list. The right hand side list of commands has somewhat unusual layout. I expected that is just textual information about setup. In setup I couldn't find anything that resembles, so I came on unusual idea to click on right hand pane entry. Bingo, text are active links to commands! Beagle looks quite different afterwards. I'll check Beagle in 10.3, is there any improvements in layout, if not it would be very important to make it look different, classic buttons seems to be first choice. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Sunday 01 April 2007 10:11, Joe Shaw wrote:

Hi,

On 3/31/07, Rajko M. wrote:

...

The right hand side list of commands has somewhat unusual layout. I expected that is just textual information about setup. In setup I couldn't find anything that resembles, so I came on unusual idea to click on right hand pane entry.

Bingo, text are active links to commands!

Beagle looks quite different afterwards.

I'll check Beagle in 10.3, is there any improvements in layout, if not it would be very important to make it look different, classic buttons seems to be first choice.

I'm not sure I understand. Are you using the KDE front end (called Kerry) or the GNOME one?

Joe

It is Kerry Beagle. I like clean look, and present soultion is very clean. The problem is that the first time users something has to tell that they can select Kerry Beagle action using this list. Somehow I succeeded to run over links fast enough to miss cursor change, or to hover over the title. Little highlight would be helpful to new users. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Monday 02 April 2007 05:19, Stephan Binner wrote:

On Sunday, 1. April 2007 17:50:36 Rajko M. wrote:

...

It is Kerry Beagle. Little highlight would be helpful to new users.

Just added to Kerry SVN that the background color changes on hover.

Bye, Steve

Thanks. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org