[Dextrose] Stability stuff

[Martin Abente]

On Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:46:02 +0200, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org>
wrote:
> El Thu, 02-09-2010 a las 09:26 -0400, Martin Abente escribió:
>> Weird, I really tried to trigger it on our last Dextrose build and
never
>> happened.
> 
> Perhaps it's gone, but I have not done anything to fix it. The bug seems
> to be in Pytrhon, dbus or their dependencies.
> 
> 
>> The whole idea of killing activities is a little bit controversial I
>> think, you have to assume to many things about activities, so far just
a
>> few activities in sugar uses all the proper mechanisms, I am afraid
that
>> in
>> most of the cases kids would just loose their current work.
> 
> I thought almost all activities understood the protocol for quitting
> cleanly (probably a dbus message). You can test it by clicking Stop from
> the menu on the icons top of the frame. That wouldn't work without
> sending an IPC message of some kind (probably we use dbus because we
> can't stand to use established X11 standards to manage applications).
> 

Well, thats true in theory, assuming all the activities are properly
designed
for sugar. In the field you already know thats not the case. Also... even
when
the activities are being implemented in python through the Activity Class,
the
read and write methods needs to be implemented by the programmer. That
means it
depends on the activity specifics again.


> 
>> What about... If the system load is already close to a "critical"
point,
>> SUGAR could just stop new activities from being executed with a proper
>> warning, and suggestions.
> 
> This is also a very good suggestion. We could start by doing this, which
> is a lot easier and almost equally effective.


I see it this way: Why waiting to get sick to do something about it.
Preventive medicine
is always better. Why waiting for the machine to freeze (waiting 3 or more
minutes until its back 
to a usable state again) to do something about it, also with potential
data loss.

Having a message telling kids that the machine is too overloaded should be
enough, with 
recommendations about saving any current work and closing earlier
activities. 

This kind of mechanisms should help to the overall stability, and it makes
even more sense when you
think about XO's 1 scenarios.

:)