[Sugar-devel] Fwd: Activity startup idea

[pgf at laptop.org]

tomeu wrote:
 > 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.

for those just joining this 6 month old thread :-), here's a pointer
to at least part of the early history...

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org