I've recently installed SLES 10.0 on my desktop at work. Unfortunately my first experience of it isn't good. The load average went sky high, and because of that it took nearly half an hour to open a terminal window to find out why. It turns out that a little app, that I've been hearing about from various Linux sources as being a new cool thing, is hogging the system like a mad thing. It's called Beagle.
If you've not heard of Beagle it's an indexing system. I'd forgotten how bad indexing systems are on performance, since I've been turning them off in Windows since I first encountered the Windows 95 abomination. They feel the need to install themselves by default and promptly scan everything, thus bringing your machine to it's knees.
Since finally managing to kill the Beagle process and uninstalling it, the performance has drastically improved. However, not as much as I would like. It seems the machine is still hitting swap on a regular basis and I noticed that X is using 156MB of virtual memory, which to me seems rather a lot. I guess there are some default plugins in there that I could remove, so I'm currently working through the system apps tailoring the settings to my liking.
I have to confess the main reason for trying SLES 10 was to try out Xgl, but with the performance I'm getting at the moment, I'm not so sure installing that would be a good idea. We'll see.
Re:Beagle
sigzero on 2006-11-02T14:03:12
I suppose that is a "feature" to have to let it hog your system while it indexes? I for one would want to use my system once I built it and not have to wait for something to do an index before having normal performance.
Re:Beagle
Aristotle on 2006-11-02T16:13:32
How is this anything new? You’ve heard of updatedb?
Re:Beagle
barbie on 2006-11-03T10:37:36
Not the same. An indexing system like Beagle looks at the content, not just the name and location. However, in most instances
locateis my first choice anyway;) Re:Beagle
Aristotle on 2006-11-03T11:32:37
It is the same, in that it hogs your disk and a sizable amount of CPU (though not quite as much of that). updatedb just gets done a lot sooner because it scans a lot less data (just the filenames, not the content). It doesn’t seems unreasonable to me to simply relegate the full scan to the wee hours.
Re:Beagle
barbie on 2006-11-02T14:07:04
This was after installing it and leaving it over 2 weekends and a weeks holiday! I could understand the indexing taking a few hours, but after 9 days it really should have completed that. I don't have that many files in the 20GB used on a 40GB drive.
On this particular machine, Beagle isn't something that would be particularly useful anyway, so would have been an unwanted overhead. The fact that it didn't seem to cope very well, just meant I got rid of it sooner rather than later.
