Re: indexing questions

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 19:12 +0200, Atte Andr�ensen wrote:
> 1) Does beagle crawl symlinks?

No, it doesn't.

> 2) What fields are indexed by beagle? My guess is that the exim field 
> "description" would be the one to use for keywords, names of persons 
> etc, is that the way to go?

What is indexed varies from file type to file type, and unfortunately
there isn't any comprehensive list.  Generally speaking, however, Beagle
indexes all of the EXIF and XMP metadata, and if you're using F-Spot it
will index the tags used as well.

> 3) I tried to "walk the dog" on my data partition (where the photos + 
> lots of other stuff are) and after a while I got:
> 
> Maximum watch limit hit. Try adjusting 
>                   /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches.
> inotify_add_watch: No space left on device
> 
> Is this only happening when "walking the dog" or is something I should 
> adjust no matter what? What's the tradeoff here, could I for instance 
> set it to 100000 without getting into trouble? Right now it's 8192:
> 
> atte ajstrup:~$ cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
> 8192

It is a hard, system-wide limit, and has no real effect on whether you
use BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG or not, although it will certainly be hit
faster if you do.

The tradeoff is that the amount of potential kernel memory used
increases the higher you set that number.  If you only use 30000
watches, it doesn't matter whether or not you set it to 30000 or 100000.
But if you actually try to use 30001 watches, the limit will prevent you
from using that extra memory.

The overhead per watch is fairly low.  Only a couple dozen bytes per
watch, but it does pin an inode in memory.  On a machine with a lot of
memory this probably has no effect at all since most of those inodes
will be cached in memory anyhow, but could be an issue on older
machines.

Basically, I would have no problem suggesting to you to set it to 32k or
64k.  I am thinking that we should ship an init script or something in
Beagle (maybe at least for SUSE) which does this automatically on boot.
For most people it won't affect them at all.

Joe

P.S. To see (roughly) how many directories are underneath your home dir,
run this from your home directory:

        find . -type d | grep -v "^\.\/\." | wc -l