Anytime I ask a Mono or Beagle developer about the Beagle app they tell me all kinds of great things.  Anytime I ask a regular user (which there tend to be more of) there complain about how much it sucks resources, power, etc.

Well both parties might be interested in this.  I just installed powertop (nice work intel) and the first thing it suggests (verbatim):

Suggestion: Disable or remove 'beagle' from your system.  Beagle is the program that indexes for easy desktop search, however it's not very efficient and costs a significant amount of battery life.

Any suggestions from either side?

If this site has been useful, please consider participating in the Fundraiser.

Other Points of Interest

  • No Related Post

Comments

14 Responses to “Beagle : Simple Questions”

  1. matt on August 3rd, 2007 12:11 pm

    Honestly, I love beagle, but, recently, I’ve switched to tracker, simply for the speed/resource freedom compared to beagle. Beagle will edges it in the sheer number and quality of index/filters, but, tracker is shaping up nicely. I just wish one would get adopted as “standard” so more applications could use X indexer as their data storage backend.

    just my 2 cents

  2. christian on August 3rd, 2007 12:19 pm

    Nobody that I know wants to run apps developed in Mono, let the SuSE camp have their bloated, patent encumbered piece of crap. Tracker user here too.

  3. Mariano Draghi on August 3rd, 2007 12:43 pm

    I’ve also switched to Tracker a couple of months ago. It’s not as polished as Beagle (yet), but it’s MUCH resource-friendly. And it’s WAY FASTER than Beagle.

  4. Andreas Zwinkau on August 3rd, 2007 1:07 pm

    matt, there won’t be a standard app, but a standard protocol.

    http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/XesamAbout

  5. Sandy on August 3rd, 2007 1:11 pm

    This was discussed on the Beagle mailing list a little while ago. Here’s the start of that thread:

    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2007-May/msg00024.html

    There may be useful information there for you.

  6. Tester on August 3rd, 2007 2:30 pm

    try strigi

  7. Flavio on August 3rd, 2007 2:31 pm

    try Strigi (http://strigi.sf.net) ;)

  8. Christoph Langner on August 3rd, 2007 3:29 pm

    You can tell beagle not to index the harddisk while on battery power. So where’s the problem?

  9. Beagle : Simple Questions « life, liberty, and the pursuit of open standards on August 3rd, 2007 3:42 pm
  10. Sontek on August 3rd, 2007 5:17 pm

    Resources are not the same as battery power. Obviously if an application is running all the time and indexing all the time, its going to eat battery life =)

    You just have it disabled while running on battery.

    But as for being a resource hog, I’ve never had any problem with it taking up to much CPU or RAM.

  11. Jon on August 4th, 2007 2:30 am

    Beagle consumes too many resources imho even in non power-constrained environments. I stopped using it for good when it’s indexes ate 20-30GB of space in my /home.

  12. Stoffe on August 4th, 2007 9:14 am

    Beagle is just crazy and either noone cares or it’s unfixable, because it has been that way forever. Tracker is just so much better it’s not even funny, *and* it does much more than just indexing.

    Beagle is a bit more polished interface-wise and indexes a few things more, however they are all but obsolete already.

    Still, we should all thank the Beagle team for showing the way so that others could bring a better implementation! There’s absolutely not fault in the attempt they made and I’m happy they did. It’s just that others went and did it better when it turned out to have problems. This is very common in software, and nothing to be upset about.

    Go Tracker! Thanks Beagle (now go away).

  13. Joe Shaw on August 4th, 2007 9:16 am

    Hi,

    I’m the maintainer of Beagle, and I’ve spoken to the PowerTop and Mono guys about the message.

    The issue is a bug in Mono, I believe it will be fixed in their 1.2.5 release coming this week (if not that, then the following release). It happens to appear in Beagle because Beagle is threaded and pretty havily uses the buggy codepath.

    For any of the other commenters who have had issues with Beagle, I invite you to email me directly (joe@joeshaw.org) and I’ll try to help identify and fix your problem. In a lot of cases the bugs you may have seen have simply been fixed in newer versions of Beagle.

    Thanks,
    Joe

  14. Michael on June 20th, 2008 2:44 pm

    I guess I’m the only one, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a tutorial on switching out Tracker for Beagle under Ubuntu 8.04. Beagle worked pretty well for me when I tried it, but I’ve been using Tracker since it is setup in Ubuntu by default. Tracker has been kind of flakey for me. A search may work great one time and then, the next day, the same search brings up nothing (or sometimes just emails). My workaround is to re-index. I haven’t filed a bug because I can’t figure out reliable steps to reproduce.

    Also, I would love it if Tracker could index my Tomboy notes like Beagle did.

Leave a Comment




    Subscribe to the RSS feed!


    subscribe to the ubuntu tutorials RSS feed

    Ubuntu Tutorials Fundraiser


    Please Donate to
    Server Improvement

    Target amount: USD1,000.00
    Total Donations: USD328.00
    Amount Needed: USD672.00

    Thank you for your support!

    Click to Donate

    Polls



  • Blogroll

  • Ads by Google