Strigidaemon

[Dominik Haumann]

On Wednesday 02 April 2008, David Faure wrote:
> On Friday 28 March 2008, Randy Kramer wrote:
> > The selections of when to index should include options like:
> >    * at specified times (which will end up most likely being nights)
> > and dates (I wouldn't index all my files every night, for one thing
> > it's unnecessary (sp?) wear and tear on the disk drive, as well as
> > unnecessary power use--I might index a certain small set of files
> > daily, others I might index monthly or less often (or maybe just on
> > demand)
> >    * just before shutdown (i.e., an option to start indexing when the
> > user calls for a shutdown, and then shutting off the computer when
> > indexing is complete)
> >    * at startup--I'm almost willing to bet no one will choose this
> > unless you make it the default choice, in which case see my last
> > paragraph, below
>
> * while the screensaver is shown.
> This is better than shutdown/startup because some computers are never
> switched off, or use suspend-to-ram/disk so the actual shutdown/startup
> sequence never happens. On the other hand, nobody is working 100% of the
> time, so the screensaver (or doing idle-time-detection in the daemon
> itself, in case no screensaver is configured) is a better solution from a
> user point of view (although not from a writing-portable-code point of
> view). I didn't invent the idea, I can hear Windows XP working on the
> harddisk for a long time once the screensaver shows :)  (could be the
> anti-virus I guess, but the idea is valid IMHO).

I believe this is one of the best approaches. Btw, can strigi be suspended, 
i.e. stoppped so that it continues indexing later at the point where it 
stopped?

Another point is that it should (probably) not run when a notebook is in 
battery mode. updatedb does not take this into account, which is *really* 
dumb.

Dominik