[sugar] human factors when launching an activity

[Mikus Grinbergs]

Martin, your response has brought up a number of topics:

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> About two weeks ago I had this same impression as you do now, though,
> before I noticed that it was because the datastore was busy indexing a
> few kernel build trees on two usb drives I had plugged in.

Well, I have a NUMBER of removable storage devices plugged in.  When 
I first started, I wrote a ticket saying "please give me a way to 
tell Journal NOT to 'index' these".  That ticket was closed with: 
"that's something we have in mind <for a future implementation>".

As it is, when I do an 'olpc-dump', I've seen it be larger than 1MB 
-- because of the 'datastore.log' files.  Obviously, *something* is 
spending a LOT of time "walking" my removable storage devices.  But 
since this is something NOT DOCUMENTED for users to control, I'm 
choosing to live with it. [And complain about Sugar responsiveness.]

--------

> Are you sure that the machine is otherwise idle when you're
> experiencing these undesireable delays?

How should I know ?  Is there a 'resource monitor' for Sugar ?

If I walk up to the machine at a random moment and issue 'top', it 
typically shows the machine to be 90% idle.  But there have been 
plenty of times when 'top' shows it to be 0% idle.  For instance, if 
I do 'sugar-control-panel -g available_updates' on a recent Joyride, 
the machine goes 0% idle for 10+ minutes, then gets an OOM.

--------

> dbus-send --session --print-reply --reply-timeout=3D2000         \
>           --type=3Dmethod_call --dest=3Dorg.laptop.sugar.DataStore \
>           /org/laptop/sugar/DataStore org.laptop.sugar.DataStore.unmount \
>           string:<datastore mount id>

THIS is what I have the greatest amount of difficulty with.  I fail 
to see the necessity of users having to learn the "internals" of 
dbus usage in order to be able to control their systems.  If there 
is a "knob" that users need to turn, DOCUMENT IT !!!

Besides which, I have my removable storage devices mounted __for a 
purpose__.  [They contain software and data which I reference every 
time I use the system.]  I have no intention of unmounting them.


mikus