[Sugar-devel] Killing activities when memory gets short

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On 8 Aug 2010, at 20:38, Lucian Branescu <lucian.branescu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Imo a confirmation popup would become annoying very quickly. Also if the user refuses, the kernel will have soon to kill an activity, which is worst.
> 
> Activities already write_file when they lose focus, they could
> write_file periodically or at least when warned of low memory.

Yes, that's how I think it should work. Of course activities will need to do a better work to save all the possible state, because we are closing without user intervention.

> 
>> 
>>> Apps like instant messaging(though I don't recall one for Sugar), would definitely need a definitive opt out, no?
>> 
>> Yeah, that's where things get tricky :/ Same issue with a background music player for example. Ideally we would just keep the connection open somehow and close the whole UI, but that's going to get complex.
>> 
>> As long as this causes just minor annoyances to the user (like being disconnected or music stopping), I think it's probably something we don't need to solve in the first iteration.
> 
> Separating the activity from the service would help here. In the case
> of music, MPD would use a lot less memory than one of its GUIs.

Right, I was thinking to something along these lines too. I'm not sure how the shell would enforce this policy though. Maybe we could allow the activity processes to use a minimum amount of memory when it has been asked to close. As I said, it gets complicated :)

Marco
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