Beagle : Simple Questions

By | 2007/08/03
14 Comments

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?

14 thoughts on “Beagle : Simple Questions”

  1. matt

    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

    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

    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.

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  10. Sontek

    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

    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

    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

    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 ([email protected]) 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

    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.

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