Monthly Archive for November, 2007

Mono 1.2.6 Memory Usage

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by
Kevin Kubasik
on November 16, 2007
in Kubasik
. 5 Comments

So, I’ve heard a lot of hype about the upcoming 1.2.6 release of Mono being faster, leaner, and more stable then ever before (due largely to Novell’s acquisition of a QA team dedicated to Mono). Beagle has always gotten flack over memory use, and as a result, we are relentless in our hunt for abused memory. And while it is wonderfully satisfying to reduce memory usage, its really hard to beat dropping megabytes of resident memory for free :). I’m running Ubuntu Gutsy and its 1.2.4 release of Mono, but in my quest for some real numbers to back up all this talk I built the current SVN trunk of Mono.

Even my most optimistic expectations put our potential benefit around maybe 2 or 3 MB resident less than beagle running under Mono 1.2.4. On my test setup, Beagle 0.3pre consumed (after my recent Opera backend fix) around 110 MB of VM and 36 MB of RSS (averaged over a 2 hour run).After building and installing Mono 1.2.6, the same 2 hour run was averaging 72 MB of VM and 27 MB of RSS! Its still far from perfect, but free memory reduction is just plain cool :).

Some observations about the general pattern of allocation and collection under 1.2.6, it ‘idles’ much lower than 1.2.4. While some actions always push the memory usage up, 1.2.6 *appeared* to return to its lower memory point much faster, and more regularly.

Anyways, I just wanted to say, props to everyone on the Mono team for rocking my socks.

Google Docs Presentations: A Major Disappointment

Published
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Kevin Kubasik
on November 15, 2007
in Kubasik
. 3 Comments

Google Docs has revolutionized the office suite, namely the word processor. Collaboration is easy, smooth, integrated, and automatic, whats more all your documents are accessible from anywhere, and all the common features I need are present. While I don’t really use spreadsheets very often, my few simple instances of using Google Doc’s for spreadsheets were easy enough. Needless to say, when I heard that a Presentation component was to be added I was excited.

Now, I’m a far cry from a Powerpoint Guru, I’ve used it maybe 2 times, but with an upcoming presentation and the Ubuntu Utah user group, I figured I should probably slap a few slides together. Since I want to have a sane contingency for the exploding laptop, forgotten laptop, or limited presentation machine, I figured this would be a great chance to stretch my presenting legs and give it a try. Too bad I’m not that lucky, I was unable to save _any_ changes, just create a new presentation, modify it as much as I wanted, but any close would lose all my work… lovely (this is in Firefox 2.0, 3.0 trunk, IE7, and Opera 8.24). I’m willing to give Google a few hours and then try again (its possible its some small downtime, its still beta after all ;) ).

Another gripe (as I read the Help to try and find similar reports of such bugs) is that there is a very limited selection of templates, while I might be able to upload new templates authored in PowerPoint or OpenOffice, couldn’t they at least let me change the color schemes? (If I can and I’m just missing how to do it, please share!)

I’ll post an update soon, and let you all know if I had any luck saving anything….

Update: This is fixed, and now its kinda cool! I’m going to try it this Saturday at the Ubuntu Utah users group and see how it goes.

Google: How do you do it?

Published
by
Kevin Kubasik
on November 2, 2007
in Kubasik
. 13 Comments

So its not a big surprise that an oft-requested feature for Beagle is the ability to index a users Gmail messages (like Google Desktop Search). Today we (the Beagle developers) started to investigate just how this is done. While POP3 (and now IMAP) are available, downloading all of a users mail, indexing it, and then caching the text so we can display it. Now, my initial investigation into GDS for Linux revealed that it was calling home via POP3s and downloading lots of data. I have assumed that it was simply iterating over all messages (via POP3), downloading them, indexing them, and caching the compressed content somewhere in Google’s custom indexes.

Now, I had originally planned on this post being an open plea to any and everyone at Google asking them to open up the Gmail access API, but seeing as its just the plain old ugly POP3 (maybe a cool extension), were stuck biting the bullet and implementing a remote mail access layer.

Anyways, given how incredible Google has been in a million other situations, I thought I would throw out 2 wildly out-of-this-world questions, I wouldn’t expect to get a response, but before I spend the time figuring it all out, I felt like I should at least ask.

  • Are there some special POP Extensions available in Gmail? Is there some helper web api? Or does GDS really just have a POP3 crawler?
  • Is your compression/text storage library open source? (or documented in some research paper at all?) Beagle has always struggled with how to best handle storing copies of a documents text so that it might be made available in interfaces. While we do have a new hybrid text cache (text over 4k on the filesystem, under in a sqlite db, all compressed) we were still no where near as small as the GDS indexes. A cursory examination reveals that the GDS indexes are some form of b-tree on disk, but how are you compressing all that text so small? Is there some substitution/reconstruction algorithm? (It seems like that would be wildly expensive, but who knows).

Anyways, its a long shot, and its pretty far out there, but for the sake of not passing up answers that I can’t seem to find elsewhere on the net, I have asked.