Killing activities when memory gets short

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Sat, 07-08-2010 a las 18:14 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso escribió:

> So we would have a periodic wakeup? The test would be the amount of
> free memory plus buffers and caches?

A polled design is clearly inferior to a proper notification system, but
it has the advantage of being simple and not requiring a particular
kernel. Once this is done, switching to a better solution should not
require extensive changes to the UI code.

BTW, looking at top, it seems that Sugar and other processes wake up
quite frequently when the system is supposed to be completely idle. It
may be background checks for updates, NetworkManager updates or the
presence service. Plus, there are a bunch of cron jobs that run in the
background, inclding the ds-backup and olpc-update.

All these things drain battery power and cause the UI to become jerky,
so we should try to limit them if possible.


> > Or, maybe, we could make this a manual process: pop up a notification
> > when memory is short and ask which activity should be closed.
> 
> I would just close one of the background activities, the LRU or the biggest one.

+1.

This, however, makes non-sugarized activities more dangerous to deal
with. One more reason to demand proper sugarization.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/