I’m running OpenSuSE 11.0 with the KDE 3.5 desktop.
Every time I log in Google Desktop consumes all my system resources for more than five minutes preventing me from doing anything useful. If I really need to do something quickly I’ll kill it, but it does come in handy sometimes when I’m looking for a document so I usually just leave the computer for five minutes so it can sort itself out.
I haven’t been happy with this state of affairs, however, and yesterday I took measures which I hoped would resolve the issue. I changed the last line of /etc/xdg/autostart/gdl_box.desktop and /usr/share/autostart/gdl_box.desktop from:
I was hoping that this would allow me to keep Google Desktop without affecting any of the applications I want to start straight after login. Alas, it was not to be The “gdl_fs_crawler” and “pdftotext” processes still run with priority 0!
I’d be grateful for any ideas which might help me achieve my goal of having Google Desktop without killing my system.
> I’d be grateful for any ideas which might help me achieve my goal of
> having Google Desktop without killing my system.
to me, it sounds exactly like a Google Desktop problem (that is, i
doubt if it is an openSUSE problem)…
so, my idea is that you ask the Google Desktop folks about it…
do they have a forum? have you asked there also?
hmmmm…one thing about openSUSE is that the default install will
have the “openSUSE Updater” (the green globe in the system tray)
operating at full blast as soon as the system comes up…and, that
thing can suck up all the cycles and bandwidth for several minutes…
AND, a bunch of the default cron jobs are set to run around
mid-night…but, if your machine was sleeping then they will begin
running about 15 minutes after you crank up…
now, i have no idea how Google Desktop works, but if it needs a lot
of cycles or bandwidth to get going, and it is competing with the
updater and cron then you just need to (for example) start it
manually, sometime after the updater and crons have finished…maybe…
I’m not suggesting that there’s a problem with Google Desktop or with OpenSuSE. They both appear to be doing what they are supposed to do. I just want to use the Linux tools to minimise Google Desktop’s impact on my other applications.
Yeah, I could start it manually, but that’s basically the same hack I’ve been using up until now.
The fact that the Google Desktop processes aren’t inheriting the nice value of the initial process suggests that they aren’t children of that process. I have no idea how KDE starts applications, but I think the answer lies in there somewhere.
I took up Google Desktop’s offer when it came out originally and got rid of it fairly quickly because it was a resource hog. I told Google why when they asked me.
If my memory serves me, it didn’t then offer anything that isn’t already in the openSUSE KDE desktop.
All I need is a desktop search. You’ve just reminded me that Beagle was originally installed on the system. I removed that quite a while ago due to it’s resource usage - Google Desktop was a big improvement!
I’ve just done a quick Google (;)) to get a feel for the current state of “desktop search”; I really like this statement on the strigi website:
Indexing operations are performed without hammering your system
With respect, desktop search is an ambiguous term. If you just need to find files, then locate will do the job; if you want to search the contents of a file, that was what Beagle was intended to do - however, it was restricted to certain file formats; so apart from being a resource hog, it never did a complete job anyway.
The “gdl_fs_crawler” and “pdftotext” processes still run with priority 0!