[Sugar-devel] Fwd: Activity startup idea

[Wade Brainerd]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

> On 9 Mar 2009, at 13:28, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>
>  On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 03:38, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>>
>
> Yea, that was rather a frequent support call back in my early Adobe days
> :-) Set it too low and they can't open some document, to high and they can't
> run the other couple of applications they needed open at the same time to
> work.


Even a warning alert would be better than nothing.

Your computer is too low on memory to start this activity.
Are you sure you want to start Browse?

It happens to me at least once every couple of days on build 767...first the
UI freezes, then the trackpad stops responding, and if I'm lucky I can
manage to Ctrl-Alt-F1 and kill Browse before having to just hard power off.
 And that's just with GMail (in Browse), a Terminal, and Typing Turtle
(which is admittedly a memory hog due to all the cached key graphics).

Also, I think we should really consider implementing that kernel OOM watch
feature.  Activities save their state when you tab away from them, so in a
lot of cases it's safe to just kill background activities.

Best,
Wade
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