[Sugar-devel] Fwd: Activity startup idea

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 03:38, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 5:46 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche <cafl at msbit.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Spend a few hours in a kindergarten classroom.  It doesn't work to
>>> prevent repeated launching of activities and ultimately a need to reboot.
>>
>> Is there anything sugar can do in this regard?
>>
>> Would this activity starting logic work:
>> * If no activity instances are running, start it.
>> * If an instance has been "started" already but the process has not yet
>> signaled on the dbus that it is "running", ie drawing windows etc. for the
>> user, switch to that instance
>> * If an instance has been started and is running, start a new instance.
>> (*or* send a "start new instance" request to the existing instance, which
>> allows us to save the overhead of loading up another "python" process)
>> * Reap all instances still in the "starting" state for more than X seconds
>> that have not explictly requested this functionality to be disabled nor
>> signaled via the dbus that they are still active
>
> What about watching system resources and refusing to start a new activity
> when there isn't enough RAM available to launch it?
> It should be pretty straightforward to add a required_memory field to
> activity.info - it would be a simple, approximate high water mark memory
> usage for a given activity.  The default could be determined by analyzing
> the basic activities - maybe 20mb would be good?

Are we sure this is a good experience for our users? I remember that
in the old MacOS times, I found a bit tiring to have to go to the
applications' info panel to lower the memory limits so the app could
launch.

The problem I see is that both the available memory in the system and
the consumed memory by a single activity are complex to measure and
much more to anticipate, so we probably won't get good enough
estimations to put in the activity.info.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Just seems like we should be attacking the problem by attacking the problem.
> Cheers,
> Wade
>
>
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