beagle:Eat less, talk less be smart

Yesterday, beagle 0.2.16 was released. A couple of weeks back, we released 0.2.15 but I did not write about it. 0.2.15 came with a lot of performance and memory improvements, new backends, new features, lots of important changes . In the process, it also broke a few things. Those were fixed and 0.2.16 is a purely bugfix release for 0.2.15. I am considering 0.2.16 the best ever beagle release. Incidentally, 0.2.13+ releases somehow or the other had some nasty problems.

Combining 0.2.15 and 0.2.16, these are the major improvements:

* Very important, the looping bug is fixed. I would even like to claim, fixed forever. I happened to find some important clue while scanning the logs and other information provided by some of our very friendly and helpful users. Eventually our 3 year old database schema was found to be incorrect. Joe finally cleared the mess. Thanks Brian and Rick! This also means an end to the "log file filling hard disk" or "beagle indexing even after a week" type problems.

* Beagle uses some external tools to filter files e.g. pdfinfo, pdftotext, mplayer yada yada. These programs are well written and almost always work. Except some very malformed or wrongly detected mimetype file is sent to them and they go berseck taking up insane amout of memory or CPU time. Since the early release, we used to maintain that there is no way we can control the external processes. After all, we just use 'em. Joe finally put an end to that excuse by using some smart rlimit tricks to limit the resources used by these external processes. We still cannot control how mplayer might behave if given an word doc file, but if it behaves badly it will be killed before too long.

* Indexing data is a strenuous job. Think about all those heavy applications which process or generate these files. But people want indexing to be as silent as possible. There are frequently recommendations that beagle should use high nice, low system priority. low IO priority etc means to be as unobtrusive as possible. The fact is, beagle already does that. However, now we even go one more step by using SCHED_BATCH scheduler policy.

There are other side improvements too, RTF filter is new. The current one is based on the legendary RTF parser by Paul Dubois. Image filters are almost new; we now have Konversation (KDE IRC client) and KOrganizer (KDE tasks and eve nts scheduler) backends. By the way, soon after 0.2.16 was released, Opera webhistory backend was added to trunk. You can just drop the binary from here into your 0.2.16 /usr/lib/beagle/Backends folder and start using it, err... trying it. I do not know how complete it is.

I would like to end by thanking the excellent user base that beagle has developed. Without them, it would not be possible to fix a whole lot of these problems. Beagle would not be what it is today without them.