Re: Don't forget the some folks use network access to Gnome

[Brian Nitz <Brian Nitz Sun COM>]

William,

Thanks for the presentation, it looks really interesting and relevant to 
some problems I see with multiuser GNOME deployments.
I'm especially interested in the "Applications are still consuming 
resources in inactive sessions.  (Videos, screensavers etc)" bullet 
under "What did we get wrong."  If we can ever get GNOME desktop 
applications to go dormant when they aren't visible to a real user, we 
could increase the number of concurrent GNOME users on a Sun Ray server 
and make GNOME much more cost effective and energy efficient desktop 
solution. 

There are quire a few things that are only noticed with huge multiuser 
deployments of GNOME which aren't noticed on single user laptops (except 
perhaps excessive fan and battery usage) but which could probably help 
nearly everyone.  For example:

- Application Memory leaks and Pixmap leaks to the X server:  These 
leaks are far more noticeable in some shared thin client environments 
where typically the user never logs out of their GNOME session, they 
simply detach a running session from a thin client display.  It's 
important for memory to be very well managed within the persistent part 
of a user session.  For example, I can kill all applications within my 
gnome-session, and restore "most" of my session including firefox tabs, 
but pixmaps leaked to the Xserver remain allocated until I kill the X 
server.

- Redundancy (Do 100 users on one machine really need 100 instances of 
gconfd-2 and its entire in-memory database? )

- Excessive polling

- Excessive context switches

- Assuming the application "owns" the resource.  (Behavior around sound 
cards, DVD drives and other hardware devices can be weird when 
applications assume the user is on the console.  For example, when I put 
a DVD in the console's drive, should the icon appear on all attached 
user's desktops/?)


There are some features and "eye candy" which I hope will have an option 
to disable, at least until we all have Gigabit Internet in our homes .  
For example:

- Solid move vs wireframe.
- 3D features
- Deep directory thumbnailing and indexing (we encountered problems a 
few years ago when nautilus traversed the corporate NFS directory 
hierarchy building thumbnails for everyone, everywhere.  I'm not looking 
forward to similar problems with beagle/tracker ;-)


I'd like to find out more about where you are in ConsoleKit and other 
session related frameworks and try to help if possible.

William Jon McCann wrote:
> Hi Seb,
>
> On Dec 7, 2007 7:13 AM, Seb James <seb esfnet co uk> wrote:
> ...
>   
> > 2) I think this is one for the gdm developers or specifically for the
> > gdm theme developers. The window that shows up when you choose "Log Out
> > $user" or "Shut Down" always has slightly the wrong options when you are
> > in an XDMCP environment. For example, the "Switch User" option is often
> > available, which only works when you are at the real console of the
> > machine. A little tidying up here and testing with XDMCP would add some
> > nice polish to our favourite desktop environment.
> >     
>
> And the user switcher applet should not be shown in this case either.
> These and other things were included in the "What did we get wrong"
> section of my GUADEC talk [1].  We aim to fix these with the new GDM
> [2].
>
> Jon
>
> [1] http://people.freedesktop.org/~mccann/talks/guadec-multiuser.pdf
> [2] http://live.gnome.org/GDM/NewDesign
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